


Victor

by airandangels



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Kidfic, M/M, Rating May Change, Unfinished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-16
Updated: 2012-05-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:28:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airandangels/pseuds/airandangels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written from a plot-bunny by blossommorphine: namely, GENETICALLY ENGINEERED KID CREATED WITHOUT JULIAN AND GARAK'S KNOWLEDGE OR PERMISSION.  Unfinished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [resurrection_rite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/resurrection_rite/gifts).



Garak woke with his throat full of dust and his eyes gummed shut. He rolled over and groped for the flask of water beside his pallet, taking a long drink that burned down his raw gullet. He poured a little more water into his cupped hand and bathed his eyes until he could open them. Dust was everywhere in the ruins of Cardassia’s capital. His nose was constantly clogged with it. There seemed no way to keep it out of his tent. You would think that, with the much-vaunted standards of Federation technology, they could find a way to keep _dust_ out of a _tent._

He could not quite refrain from bitterness at the fact that, after everything, Cardassia’s halting recovery from near-annihilation was dependent on massive Federation aid. Quite a lot of the material came from Bajor. Bajor! Perhaps that was why the tent was so draughty; the Bajorans were getting their own back in a myriad tiny ways, each as irritating as a speck of grit in your eye, all together as devastating as a sandstorm.

There were few buildings left standing, and most of those had been declared structurally unsound by Starfleet engineers. They were using tractor beams to safely demolish them. Three vast white ships orbited Cardassia Prime, sleek and smug. Sometimes they entered the atmosphere, and the survivors looked up at them warily. Garak moved among them, trying to organise, to co-ordinate. He had arrived thinking in terms of a provisional government, and had had to downgrade his aspirations to simply trying to get people registered for aid which many of them were reluctant, ashamed to accept. Now his curriculum vitae could list government agent, gardener, tailor, social worker. Odious!

He sat up with a grunt and pressed his hands into the small of his back, stretching out the crick that he always woke up with. He had hated the station so much, but oh, what he would give now for even the basic amenities it had offered. He took off dusty pyjamas, pulled on dusty clothes and shoes, and went outside to the tent city’s communal standpipe to wash his face and rinse his mouth with cold water. (Hot, fragrant baths. Saunas. Sonic showers, even. They weren’t refreshing but they would get rid of dust.)

A young man walked up with a bucket, raising a hand in a sketched greeting. Garak knew him slightly as a neighbour; one half of his face was quite beautiful and the other was a scarred ruin, the hair burned away from the temple, a shiny streak of scalp laid bare. It sometimes seemed to him that that boy _was_ Cardassia, and he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to embrace him or... there was really no ‘or,’ and no question of an embrace. The young man filled his bucket, briefly waved again and walked away, leaning away from the weight of the water.

At mid-morning, he was sketching out a plan for a community vegetable garden, pacing around a roughly clear area of waste-ground and making notes about plants, tools, supplies, when he was approached by a man somewhat older than him, thin and aquiline, with iron-grey hair.

‘Good morning, Mr Garak,’ the newcomer said, nodding affably.

‘Good morning. I fear you have the advantage of me.’

‘Crell Moset.’

‘The illustrious Dr Moset. It’s a pleasure.’ He had recognised the man, of course. How fascinating it would be to discuss him and his work with Julian. No more discussions with Julian, for a long time, perhaps for ever. Oh, he didn’t need to think of that just now, of the luminous eyes and sweet mouth and slim brown hands, long fingers criss-crossed around a teacup. He crushed that thought away and maintained his affable, interested half-smile.

‘The pleasure is mine. It’s a relief to find you.’ Moset folded his hands behind his back and returned the smile.

‘It’s difficult to find anyone these days. My compliments on your detective work. To what do I owe this _mutual_ pleasure?’

‘I think you know,’ Moset said, his smile broadening slightly.

‘You really do have the advantage of me,’ Garak admitted. ‘I know we haven’t met before. Do you want to offer your professional assistance? I can put you in touch with the Starfleet medical officer in charge of this encampment.’ Moset’s gaze shifted, past Garak’s shoulder, and he nodded in that direction. Casually, he turned to look, as if still planning his garden. A few yards away, a little boy was crouching in the dust, intently watching a small beetle as it trundled across the uneven ground. Abruptly, the beetle unfolded its wing-cases, unfurling shimmering wings, and buzzed up into the air and away. The boy lifted his head to watch it go, and Garak’s hearing dropped away to a feedback whine as he recognised Julian’s eyes, framed by his own brow ridges. Julian’s unruly brown hair. His own thin lips and round face. Nose a mixture, he couldn’t say. Complexion dusky, dark for a Cardassian but not a human brown, a sort of dun colour. Beautiful, impossible little child.

‘I haven’t told him you’re here,’ Moset was saying beyond the whine. ‘I didn’t want to over-excite him. We should introduce you gradually. Are - are you all right?’

Garak turned his back on the boy, so he absolutely could not see him, grabbed Moset’s upper arm and hurried him several paces further off. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? What is he?’ he hissed.

Moset blinked at him. ‘You didn’t know,’ he said slowly.

‘No, but I am _going_ to know, depend on it. Explain yourself!’ He put all the command he could into his voice and his eyes, though he feared it was far from his best performance. At the very least he could be sure he was hurting Moset’s arm.

‘I can’t understand why he didn’t tell you.’

‘Who? Tain?’ It was a leap, but it seemed the most reasonable one. It turned his world upside down; it had to be his father’s doing.

‘Then he did?’

‘He told me nothing. You’re going to tell me.’

‘That’s your son. Tain’s grandson. The continuation of the line - he said he didn’t think you were going to take care of it yourself. A bastard, of course, but that’s unavoidable. It’s not as if you could have married his - other father.’

‘And you? You _made_ him?’

‘To Tain’s orders.’

‘How in hell did he even get hold of Julian’s DNA? What _possessed_ him?’

‘As to the first, I didn’t ask, and for the second, I would think paternal love.’

‘Ah, no,’ Garak said, with a short bark of laughter. ‘No, that wouldn’t answer at all. He thought this would be useful somehow.’

‘Of course it’s useful. This boy is _extremely_ useful. _Federation_ genetic enhancements. The science they abandoned rather than let the rest of us benefit from any of it. I wanted your permission, your co-operation - you are, after all, the boy’s next of kin, and a useful man to know in any case - we must obtain facilities, equipment, cloning isn’t that complex but it does require the right conditions.’ Moset’s eyes were alight with slightly cracked ambition.

‘First you’ve created this... chimera, and now you propose to clone him? How old is he? Four? Have you the faintest idea whether he’ll be stable in the long term? What is he supposed to be, the new Jem’Hadar?’

‘Better. And _ours.’_

‘No.’ Garak stopped himself, taking a controlled breath. ‘That would be extremely unwise in the present climate. Impracticable, at the moment, and in the foreseeable future, inadvisable.’

‘I’m not a young man any more, Mr Garak. I won’t be able to work on this project forever.’

‘I am simply asking you to put more time and diligence into laying the groundwork. I repeat, you have no idea of his long-term stability. By its nature, genetic engineering is often work that takes multiple generations. Don’t worry. You’ll get the credit you deserve.’ He released his grip on Moset’s arm. ‘My apologies, Doctor. You can imagine my emotions.’

‘I’m sure.’ Moset glanced over Garak’s shoulder again, rubbing his arm. ‘Still grubbing about in the dirt. Once he gets interested in something, you have to pry him away. Do you want to meet him?’

 _No, I can’t possibly. He isn’t mine, not really._

‘Very well.’

Moset led Garak back to the little boy, who was now watching a procession of ants making their way into a hole in the ground. ‘Eighty,’ the doctor said, bending down towards him, ‘come and meet Mr Garak.’

The little boy scuffled to his feet, wiping his dirty hands on the front of his tunic and looking up at Garak expectantly.

‘Hello,’ Garak said. He forced himself to reach out and touch the boy’s shoulder, a stiff-handed pat, not the squeeze that would have shown real warmth. ‘Eighty?’ he asked Moset.

‘My eighth attempt,’ Moset said. ‘Not,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘my eightieth!’

‘No other name?’

‘My father’s going to name me,’ the boy said. He had a squeaky little voice and very precise diction for such a young child. ‘My fathers are,’ he corrected himself.

‘Fathers, eh?’

‘Yes, I’ve got two. Most people have only got one, but I’m a bit special.’

‘I’m sure you are. Who are your fathers, if I may ask?’

Eighty looked up at Moset as if asking permission. ‘Yes, go on,’ the doctor said.

‘My one father is Cardassian, and he’s a very brave man who’s done lots of good things for the state to take care of all of us. And my other father is Human, and he’s a very clever man, he’s a doctor like Dr Moset, he’s cleverer and stronger than all the other Humans. And Dr Moset made me out of the best bits of both of them, so I could be a good boy.’

‘And are you a good boy?’

‘I’m trying,’ Eighty said earnestly. ‘I’m really trying.’

‘Well done.’

‘Sometimes you’re a bad boy, aren’t you, Eighty? But you soon learn.’

‘Yes,’ Eighty agreed quickly. Garak saw the quick, timid flicker in his eyes. He wanted to kill Moset and carry Eighty away to safety. He wanted to run away right now and change his name and never be heard from again, much less tracked down by mad doctors with children who shouldn’t exist in tow. He wondered if the best thing was to kill both of them. People went missing all the time, there was no reliable census of who was still alive, he could do it quickly and painlessly for the child. No, he absolutely could not.

 _‘My fathers are going to name me.’ I can’t name a child. The only names I know how to come up with are aliases. And Julian would want to call him something ridiculous like Leonidas or Caractacus or Hannibal, wouldn’t he? And tell him terrible stories about wolves?_

‘It was very nice to meet you, Eighty,’ he said. ‘Dr Moset, I must ask you to excuse me. I’m very busy today.’

‘Then perhaps we can come back tomorrow.’

‘I’m afraid I shall be busier then.’

‘We’ve come a very long way, and the roads are in a shocking state,’ Moset pressed. ‘Perhaps you can recommend a place for us to stay tonight.’

‘Really, you needn’t stay.’

‘But we should be here when Dr Bashir arrives.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Garak said numbly.

‘I have, of course, sent a message to Dr Bashir asking him to come and meet us.’

‘Dr Bashir is a very busy man, with a full medical practice on Deep Space Nine. I’m sure he can’t be spared to...’ But it was exactly the sort of thing that was guaranteed to get Julian here post haste. Mysterious message. Prospect of adventure and intrigue.

Something was touching his hand. The boy was touching his hand. He only just kept himself from snatching it away.

‘You’ve hurt your finger,’ Eighty said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Quite all right. Just a little slip with the scissors, trying to sew in bad light.’ Last night he had been repairing a ripped coat that he had found wadded into a broken window-frame, thinking it would fit the young man with the scarred face. The shadows from the lantern suspended from the tent frame, swinging with the wind, had forced him to give up, cursing as he sucked his nicked finger. Today it was puffy and sore and he very much hoped it was not infected.

‘Poor Mr Garak,’ said Eighty, holding his hand and patting it gently, his grubby little paws as warm and soft and maddeningly _kind_ as Julian’s hands.

‘Poor me,’ Garak agreed, with feeling.


	2. Weeds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garak spends a little more time with Eighty, waiting for Julian to arrive.

There was nothing else he could reasonably do, so Garak made room for Dr Moset and Eighty in his tent. They had brought bedrolls with them, though good form required that he give up his own slightly better mattress to the doctor, the elder man. Eighty unrolled his bedding neatly and sat down on it with his hands folded, not poking about the tent or asking questions or doing anything else you might expect from a small child. It gave Garak the creeps. It was nice that he was so well-behaved and composed, of course it was, but it seemed unnatural at his age. He noticed, with relief, that the boy was squirming very slightly, and when Moset’s back was turned his eyes darted around eagerly, taking in everything he could.

‘Perhaps Eighty can help you with your work today,’ Moset suggested. ‘He takes instruction well, and he’s quite a reliable little assistant when there are things to be fetched and carried.’ He sat down heavily on Garak’s bed. ‘If I may, I’ll take a little nap. I didn’t sleep last night.’

 _You bastard,_ Garak thought, _leaving me alone with him._ ‘Of course,’ he said aloud. ‘Rest well. I’m sorry I can’t offer you more comfortable accommodations, but there’s a little stove here, a kettle, and tea in this tin. I brought water in this morning. Please keep the cover on the bucket, or it gets very dusty.’ He turned to look at Eighty, unable to stall any longer. ‘Well. Come with me, Eighty. I’m sure I can find something helpful for you to do.’

Eighty scrambled up eagerly and followed Garak out of the tent, back towards the waste-ground, scurrying at his heels until he amended his pace to allow much shorter legs to keep up.

‘Do you know anything about gardens, Eighty?’ _That is not a proper name. Sounds like a Borg or something. But I can’t give him any other. Well, of all the names in the galaxy, we can certainly be sure I wouldn’t call him Enabran._

‘There was one at Dr Moset’s house,’ Eighty said, ‘but it all burned down.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. You call him Dr Moset?’ _Not... Uncle or anything?_

‘Doctor, mostly. I mean I mostly call him doctor. I don’t call him Dr Mostly.’ Eighty laughed at that idea and sounded so much like a higher-pitched Julian that Garak had to look away for a moment.

‘Well, you may call me...’ _Uncle_ would have been appropriate, Cardassian children generally called adults Uncle or Auntie if they were on friendly terms, related or not, but it was too big a lie somehow, even for him. ‘Garak,’ he concluded. ‘Just Garak will be fine.’

‘Okay Garak,’ said Eighty, and took hold of his hand again. So terribly trusting. At the moment he saw far more of Julian in the boy than of himself.

‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘we’re going to start a vegetable garden to grow food for the people living here. I’ve found a place for it, and our next step is to get rid of all the weeds growing there now. After that, we’ll get some tools, shovels and hoes and so on, and break up the ground and add fertilisers to get it ready for planting. Then we can mark out all the little areas for different plants. Today’s job is easy: if you find anything growing, just pull it up.’

‘But,’ said Eighty, frowning thoughtfully, ‘do you need to grow food? Because the Starfleet people have replicators and they’ll give us food if we ask. Dr Moset and me have had Starfleet food a few times.’

‘A reasonable question,’ Garak said. They had come to the edge of the waste-ground now, and he let go the boy’s hand and crouched to pull up the first weed that presented itself. ‘Do you see this? It’s an interesting plant. When there has been a terrible fire, or a bomb has gone off, it’s the first thing to grow back. It’s called elassa. There’s a plant very like it on Bajor, called pulat, and on Romulus, called derak, and I believe they even have one on Earth, with the prettiest name of the lot, rosebay willowherb. Weeds are a nuisance, of course, but still, where people see elassa growing, they have a feeling of hope. They know that all this ruin isn’t forever.’ He gave the plant to Eighty, who turned it around in his hands, carefully examining it from dirty roots to green-gold flowerheads.

‘The elassa,’ Garak went on, ‘is the first step of life coming back. But if only elassa ever grows here, well, it will just be a wasteland. The flowers would be pretty, but it would be no help or use to anyone.’

‘Insects,’ Eighty said unexpectedly, still engrossed in the flowers. ‘It would help insects.’ His eyes darted up guiltily and he half-cringed, as if he thought he would be punished for contradicting an adult, but hadn’t been able to stop himself.

‘Quite right, I suppose. But when I say “anyone,” I mean people. Now, people need food and water and sleep, and they need to keep warm but not get too hot. Those are all the needs of our bodies, and yes, we could meet the food needs of our bodies with Starfleet rations. But we’re not just our bodies, are we? We have minds, and feelings.’ Without quite thinking about it, he lightly tapped the boy’s forehead, then his chest. ‘We need to feel useful, to know that what we’re doing is helping our families and our race. If we don’t feel useful, our stomachs may be full but our hearts will be empty.’ He hoped he wasn’t being too metaphorical, but Eighty was nodding as if he understood.

‘I’m going to make a start on this garden, with your help, and when other people notice what we’re doing, we’ll ask them to join in. And when they work in the garden, and see the plants grow big and healthy because of their care, and eventually take their share of the vegetables home to their families, they’ll feel useful, and proud, and hopeful. What’s more, it will keep them busy. When people spend too much time sitting around with not enough to do, because so many of their jobs are gone, they find things to do that we’d rather they didn’t. I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you get bored you’re more likely to be naughty.’

Eighty looked doubtful. ‘I’m hardly ever bored,’ he said. ‘And when I’m naughty it’s usually doing something I thought was really interesting.’

‘Oh yes? Such as?’

‘I found out you could make a little fire with the sun and a magnifying glass. I wasn’t going to burn anything! I was just looking at the leaves in autumn and then there was a brown spot and then there was a black spot and smoke and then it was on fire! And it was so interesting and I wanted to see if I could do it again on purpose, and I thought I could put it out when I was finished because it was only little, but it got really big when I wasn’t looking and the whole bush was on fire and it was really bad.’

‘Oh my. And... is this how the garden at Dr Mostly’s house burned down?’

Eighty nodded mutely, not seeming to notice Garak’s slip of the tongue, which he had hoped would amuse him.

‘Was anybody hurt?’

‘No.’

‘That’s something, then. I had thought you meant it was burned in the war. I expect the doctor was pretty cross with you about that, wasn’t he?’

‘He said I was so bad he should throw me away and start again, like the little boys before me.’

For a moment Garak couldn’t speak; he briefly forgot to breathe. He had also, perhaps naïvely, thought that when Moset said Eighty was his eighth attempt, he had meant that the first seven had simply not produced viable embryos, or resulted in infants that didn’t live long because of genetic defects. Had he been raising and killing actual _children?_ And using the spectre of their deaths to _keep Eighty in line?_

 _I clearly have to kill that man._

‘Well, I am sure he didn’t mean that. It was a silly, naughty thing to do, but a really _bad_ boy would have done it on purpose. Sometimes when people are upset they say more than they mean.’

‘I don’t think Dr Mostly is ever upset.’ Eighty clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘I said it too!’

‘I won’t tell him. It can be our secret joke. Come on, let’s get weeding.’

They worked in a companionable quiet for an hour or so. From time to time Eighty would find a weed he hadn’t seen before and bring it to Garak to ask for its name. If he had a mind like Julian’s he would probably remember every one and know them again years from now. Garak watched him, moving around in a monkeyish crouch, his tiny little body free of the aches that repeated stooping was producing in his own back and legs. He was so _utterly_ Julian. Perhaps that was the answer to the whole thing; he could be Julian’s, and go back to the station with him, and have a lovely indulgent liberal it’s-okay-to-be-different everyone-is-special Federation upbringing. He might be better off that way than living on Cardassia as an obvious mixed-race bastard.

But then Garak wouldn’t see him any more.

It must be the exhaustion and the stress of living like this, dust and dirt everywhere, no peace, no true privacy. It was breaking him down and making him weak and sentimental. This child was nothing to him; they had only met today. A biological relationship guaranteed nothing nowadays; you had only to look at the number of mixed children on Bajor with no idea who their fathers were. He thought briefly of Ziyal and pushed that thought away from him, but it simply ricocheted and came back from another direction.

 _What would Ziyal think of me if she knew I had a child I wouldn’t acknowledge?_

 _She wouldn’t think anything. She’s dead._

 _Besides, it’s not as if I impregnated some unfortunate woman and abandoned her. I’m not responsible for any of this. My genetic material was used without my knowledge or permission. I’m sure if I could consult with a good lawyer we could make that out to be a crime of some sort._

 _But if I do nothing, he goes on living with Moset._

 _Or perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps Moset decides there is no point in keeping him if I don’t want him. He was raising him for me, after all, and plainly doesn’t love him. It’s difficult enough to provide for oneself these days, let alone a dependent child. Best case scenario, he abandons him. One more feral child in the ruins._

 _Worst case, he doesn’t_ go on living _at all._

 _It’s so dear how he looks carefully at each weed he pulls up - I did not think that._

He straightened up and stretched out his back. ‘Time for lunch,’ he told Eighty. ‘Put your weeds on the pile, then we’ll wash our hands and get in line at the aid station for those rations you were talking about.’

‘But have we been useful? Even if we don’t get to eat something we grew?’

‘Yes. Thoroughly useful.’

And Eighty took his hand again, because clearly that was what he expected to do now.

That night he lay on Dr Moset’s bedroll, wearily anticipating how much his back would hurt in the morning. Despite his midday nap, the doctor was having no difficulty sleeping now, and was snoring just loudly enough to give Garak difficulty. He rolled onto his side, willing Moset to do the same so the snoring would stop, and looked through the gloom at Eighty, curled up in the space between them. Before he went to bed, Moset had overseen him folding his clothes like a good little soldier, then fastened two little wire devices onto his thumbs to stop him sucking them. Feeling subversive, Garak reached over and stealthily removed one, edging Eighty’s hand closer to his face so that his thumb brushed his cheek. If the boy woke up now, what in the world could he say he was doing? He didn’t wake. After a moment he sighed slightly, popped his thumb into his mouth and suckled contentedly.

 _He’s going to grow crooked teeth and it will be my fault,_ Garak chided himself. _Ah well._


	3. Rocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Garak re-encounters Julian; Julian meets Eighty.

Garak found Julian by chance the next morning, when he went to the Federation aid station to request garden tools. He was working out how best to carry two rakes, two shovels and two hoes without tripping himself or decapitating anyone when he saw him across the crowded space, a prefabricated shed with cubicles along its sides from which various forms of assistance were dispensed. Julian was at the information desk, presumably asking directions - and, if his posture was any guide, flirting with the young lady ensign behind said desk.

Garak would have liked to think he had put vanity behind him a long time ago in his youth, but he found he shrank from re-encountering an old love while wearing dirty, shabby clothes and juggling agricultural implements. Julian did not help matters by looking clean and dapper and crisply uniformed, on top of his usual unfair advantage of being preposterously beautiful. Garak had always felt he’d managed to close that gap between them with confidence and poise, both of which seemed to have deserted him today. He pulled himself together and went over.

‘Doctor,’ he said pleasantly, catching Julian’s eye with a small nod.

‘Ah, Garak!’ Julian turned towards him, face lighting up. ‘I was just trying to find out where you live.’

‘Resettlement Camp 40,’ Garak recited. ‘Row 18, Plot 12. Not the most salubrious address I’ve ever had.’

‘I’d give you a hug but you seem to have your arms full already. Can I help you carry all that?’

‘Certainly. Would you like one of each, or two of a kind and an orphan?’

‘One of each seems fair. I wouldn’t like to break up any families.’ They shared out the tools between them, and Garak watched with some amusement while Julian went through contortions working out the best way to carry them. He settled on balancing them on his shoulder, their long handles slanting down in front of him, rather like a Roman soldier marching with his pilum, and they set off together out of the station.

‘So, have you any idea what Dr Moset’s mysterious message was about? He said he had something of great importance to convey to both of us. I must admit, that piqued my curiosity. I’d love an opportunity to talk to him about epidemiology in any case.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ Garak replied, wondering whether it would be quite fair to tell Julian the truth about Moset; not that it was widely known. ‘I do know, but I want to try to prepare you for it a little. It was sprung on me suddenly, and I found it a most unpleasant shock.’

‘But surely _you_ are unshockable.’

‘Consider, then, what a shocking development it must be.’

‘Gosh.’ Julian began to look uneasy.

‘Don’t panic.’

‘Of course not. Whatever it is, I’m sure we can deal with it together.’

‘It’s a matter of an illegitimate child,’ Garak said carefully. Spoon-feeding seemed the best strategy. Manageable bites.

‘Ah.’ Julian turned that over for a bit. ‘Presumably some sort of scandal is in the offing?’

‘I’m confident that we can keep the matter quiet. It would be best for all concerned.’

‘Particularly for the child, I’d think. Growing up is difficult enough without everybody knowing your parents’ embarrassing business.’

‘Quite.’

‘Anyone we know? Another little Dukat, perhaps? No, that wouldn’t surprise anyone enough to be scandalous.’

‘Actually, the indiscretion, if that’s the right word, was on the part of my late father.’

Julian stopped walking and turned towards Garak, the heads of the tools over his shoulder almost swiping over a man walking past them. ‘You mean you have a brother or a sister?’

‘A nearer relative than that.’

‘I don’t understand. If it’s your father’s indiscretion...’

‘Well, all operatives of the Order had their DNA sampled and preserved. It was done primarily for identification purposes, since sometimes a mission under deep cover rendered an agent unrecognisable by any other means.’

‘He had you cloned? Forgive me, but I thought he wasn’t really thrilled to have one of you.’

Garak could think of no further gentle lead-ups he could use, and they were only a couple of hundred metres from his door (flap). Eighty was sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the tent, reading a textbook that Moset had announced he must study today, since he had had a holiday helping Garak yesterday.

‘Not precisely. You see, my father became concerned about the fact that I didn’t seem to be taking any steps to secure my family line. I’m not sure why he didn’t understand my reluctance to do so. Perhaps he simply thought I was wrong, or it was of no importance. In a moment I’m going to tell you where to look to make sense of all this, and it’s very important that when you do, you keep calm.’

‘You think I’m going to freak out.’

‘What a colourful expression. All right. Move closer if you need to. Take a careful look at the little boy sitting in front of the brick-red tent with the brown patch in the roof.’

He watched Julian closely. He had never been good at keeping his feelings off his face, although in recent years he’d made some progress; when Garak had met him he had not only been an open book, the book had been in large type with lots of colourful pictures. Julian’s eyes widened, then widened more, until it was hard to believe they could fit on his face, and then his colour changed from golden to sallow. Other than that, it was a creditable attempt to retain composure.

Moving stiffly but quickly, as if driven by tightly-wound clockwork, Julian moved to the side of the path and laid down the garden tools between two tents, then took Garak’s away from him and put them down alongside. Grabbing Garak’s elbow, he propelled him back up the path, muttering ‘We’re getting out of here.’

‘What do you have in mind? You do know those tools are going to walk away as soon as we’re out of sight?’

‘Did the Dominion leave such a thing as a bar standing? I urgently need a _very_ strong drink.’

‘I think we can find something.’ There were no actual bars as such in the vicinity, but there was a sort of shebeen in a tent on the other side of the tent city, where small cups of whatever the proprietor could distill were sold.

‘It might make you go blind,’ Garak warned Julian as they sat down on a bench behind the tent.

‘All right,’ Julian said, and knocked it back in one. He shuddered at the taste and muttered ‘My God.’ Then he took Garak’s cup from his hand and swigged that down too, before fixing him with an anguished stare. ‘How long have you known?’

‘Since they arrived yesterday. Which was after Moset sent his message to you. I would have spared you this if I could.’

‘Of course, if you’d been in on it all along you could say that with exactly the same sincerity.’

‘That’s a cheap shot.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Though true.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Julian muttered. ‘I’ve always been so careful. I never thought this would happen with _you.’_

‘It isn’t because of anything we did together. As I said, he already had access to my DNA from the Order archive. Can you think of any way he could have got hold of yours? That’s been bothering me.’

Julian thought intently for a moment. ‘You know, years ago, when you were so sick and I went to see him to get information to help me treat you... he gave me tea. In fact, he knew my favourite order. There may have been usable DNA traces from my lips or hands on the cup. I suppose I may have shed hairs while I was there, for that matter. Why would he _do_ that?’

‘Perhaps he thought it was fitting. If I wasn’t going to do the filial thing and marry a suitable young woman, why not give me a child co-fathered by the person who clearly loved me?’ He folded his hands and looked down at his interlaced fingers. ‘You did love me, at the time.’

‘You say that as if I stopped. You know perfectly well I would have gone public with you, but you never would, and I couldn’t wait around forever.’ Julian stopped and wiped his hands over his face, which was shiny with sweat. It wasn’t a particularly warm day, and Garak could only conclude that it was a physiological reaction to emotional shock. ‘All of which is beside the point. As you say, this isn’t because of anything we did together. God! Forgive me, but _damn_ your father, Garak!’

‘Oh, I quite agree.’

‘How can you be so bloody _calm?’_

‘Firstly, we’re in public. Secondly, I’ve had a little time to absorb it.’

‘I can’t - I can’t be a father. I don’t - Garak, does he know? The little boy?’

‘Yes and no. He knows he has two fathers, and was made by Dr Moset at Tain’s request. He knows a sort of biographical sketch of each of us. He doesn’t know who _we_ are, though it can’t be long until he works it out. He’s very bright.’

‘Oh God.’ Julian wiped his face again. ‘What - what’s his name?’

‘He doesn’t have one.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He has a number. Eight. Dr Moset calls him Eighty. He’s waiting for his fathers to give him a name, you see. He was telling me at breakfast this morning how Moset has told him that while of course he cares about him as his guardian, he can’t possibly love him. Not the way his fathers will.’

Julian stared at him as if he were dribbling green slime. ‘I thought Crell Moset was a great man. But he’s in this up to his neck, isn’t he?’

Garak decided not to go into detail about Moset’s past accomplishments or future plans. ‘I’m afraid so. If it helps, I suppose he may have done what Tain wanted because he was intimidated by him. Telling Enabran Tain “no” would not be a prudent career move.’

‘Well... well, we have to find something better for him. Get him adopted.’

‘By whom? Do you think there are Cardassian families just sitting around saying “You know, we could do with another child, with all the space and security we have”?’

‘I think I’m going to be sick. I shouldn’t have drunk that - ohgod.’ Julian hunched over and spilt his breakfast on the ground between his feet. Garak rubbed a circle between his shoulderblades while he spat and groaned.

‘There, there. Better out than in. And other such platitudes.’

‘I can’t do this! I’m not cut out to be a father, I’ll do a horrible job and he’ll resent me and have all sorts of personal problems.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Oh, thank you _very_ much!’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was supposed to supportively contradict you. In any case, I was chiefly thinking of my own shortcomings.’

‘You wouldn’t be that bad.’

‘Yes, everyone knows torturers and professional liars make the most nurturing of parents. Far better than professional healers and caregivers.’

‘So... you wouldn’t take him? I mean, I could find some way to help. I could... I could make sure you’ve got everything you need.’

‘You are _not_ leaving me alone with him!’

‘Well, it’s not as if I’m trying to avoid responsibility. I _have_ no responsibility here and nor have you. This was done to us without our consent. It has to be illegal. Or if it isn’t, that’s only because nobody thought anyone would ever do something so bloody mad so they never legislated against it.’

That, Garak thought, was probably just panic talking. A disavowal of responsibility, especially for a vulnerable person, was simply not in character for Julian. And he didn’t know Eighty yet. Surely once he did, once he really saw himself in the boy, he would feel differently, and then it would be all ‘come home with me and I will give you an idyllic childhood, also you can help me meet women by making me look adorable and stable.’ That was if he was still looking to meet women. Blast, that was something he’d neglected to consider; what would Ezri Dax think? How could Julian ask her to accept a child technically from another relationship, whose existence he had only just discovered?

Julian was still muttering to himself about how he couldn’t do this. Garak excused himself, went back into the distiller’s tent and managed to acquire a cup of plain water, which he brought back and offered to Julian. ‘Rinse your mouth first, then have a drink. It’ll do you good.’

‘I need hot, sweet tea. Best thing in the world for shock,’ Julian said, but he gargled and spat, then drank the rest of the water with more care than he had given to the spirits.

‘If you feel better, I’d like you to come and meet him. You needn’t say who you are. We can call you Lieutenant Bashir; it’s true enough. I can even make you a cup of tea, though I don’t have anything to sweeten it with. If we hurry back, those tools may not have grown legs yet.’

Julian nodded. Some of the fight seemed to have gone out of him along with the liquor. He walked back agreeably enough, and it turned out only the rakes were gone (goodness knew why).

‘I didn’t realise it was this bad here. I mean, I watch the news, but you don’t really know until you see it at ground level,’ Julian said, picking up his half of the remaining tools.

‘I used to entertain a little daydream of bringing you to Cardassia one day and giving you the grand tour,’ Garak replied, doing the same. ‘The architecture, the gardens, the best restaurants, galleries, theatres... you would have loved it. Well. Here it is. Tents and dust. I do apologise; you’re just slightly too late. Though if you like, you can help to get a new garden started.’

Introducing Julian to Eighty went fairly well. He still had the look of a startled woodland creature, but he made his best effort at a friendly smile, then quite successfully made conversation as the boy asked him a hundred and one questions about starships and Earth and his uniform. Dr Moset having pronounced Eighty’s study efforts for the day satisfactory, he was released to help with the garden.

‘Moset’s not helping too?’ Julian asked over Eighty’s head. He had placed himself between the two of them, holding a hand each, and how, after all, did one tell a four-year-old not to hold one’s hand?

‘Why, we wouldn’t ask a _doctor_ to do this sort of dirty work,’ Garak said. Being glib and sarcastic helped a great deal at times like this, he found. They quartered the waste ground between them and set to work breaking up the soil. Eighty’s job was to pick up the rocks and carry them away to the sides, where he carefully laid them in a straight line to make a border. He clearly wanted Julian to understand the importance of what they were doing, and kept trying to repeat Garak’s explanation of the day before. The curious part was that, although he got some of it out of order and was slightly confused about the distinction between hearts and stomachs, he quoted parts of it verbatim. He also trotted happily back and forth to bring them a canteen of water.

While he was away refilling it at the standpipe, which was in sight from the waste ground, Julian said to Garak, ‘He is _unbelievable._ I mean, he’s not getting bored. And this is _boring._ A child his age should be tired and whiny and trying to distract us to come and play with him. Instead he’s examining the rocks and trying to work out what they’re made of. When I was his age - well, that’s not the best comparison. When I was his age I liked to _lick_ rocks.’

‘To work out what they were made of?’

‘I blame the fact that I was given a stick of Blackpool rock at a formative age. It’s candy and I was easily confused. Garak, he’s so _like_ you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Well, he takes after you in looks, obviously. But I mean the way he’s always thinking, the way there’s so much beneath the surface. The way he smiles!’

‘I think he’s just like _you.’_

‘A bit, of course, but he’s definitely his father’s son.’

‘You’re exactly as much his father as I am, and he takes after you far more. Just look at his eyes.’

‘His hands are just like yours.’

‘Well, his hair is just like _yours.’_

‘Agree to disagree, I suppose.’

‘That is the most irritating expression. Have you looked at his ears?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, shall we dissect him and argue about whose liver he’s got?’ Julian’s face was sweaty again, though probably from honest toil rather than nervous reaction. He unzipped the top half of his uniform, pulled it off and knotted the arms of it around his waist, pushing up the sleeves of his undershirt. There were darker teal circles under his arms and a matching streak down the middle of his back. ‘And if I’d known you were going to make me do farm work I’d have worn - I don’t know. I don’t _own_ clothes for this sort of thing. I’d have to replicate some sort of dungarees.’

‘You _wound_ me, Julian. You wouldn’t ask me to make them for you?’

‘Good idea. You could cut up a tent and make them out of canvas.’ Julian tugged down the zip of his undershirt’s collar and turned gratefully towards Eighty, who was jog-trotting back with the full canteen clasped to his chest. ‘There’s a good lad. That’s just what I need.’ He tipped back his head and took a long drink, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Garak looked unobtrusively at the vee of smooth caramel chest on display and the strong slender forearms and bony wrists and large capable hands, and wondered if this was a deliberate ploy to attract him or purely oblivious. Sometimes Julian had seemed to understand about flirtation through bickering and sometimes it had apparently gone quite over his head.

Perhaps he was simply in a bad mood, or feeling passive-aggressive, because shortly afterwards he abandoned honest toil to sit in the dirt beside Eighty’s border and give him an impromptu lesson in geology. Garak broke up dry clods of earth and cursed his deteriorating back while terms like ‘sedimentary,’ ‘metamorphic’ and ‘igneous’ were bandied about.

‘Igneous means “of fire,” and those rocks are formed by volcanoes. Let’s see, some igneous rocks are pumice, scoria, granite, basalt, gabbro...’

‘Obsidian,’ Garak put in, stopping to lean on his hoe. ‘Don’t forget obsidian. Very important stone.’

‘Obsidian is volcanic glass. It’s black and shiny and it breaks to very sharp edges. Thousands of years ago, the earliest Cardassian people chipped and carved obsidian to make spearheads and knives for hunting and fighting.’

‘Did Earth people too?’

‘Yes, but they used more flint. What kind of stone did you learn flint is?’

‘Um, sedimentary?’

‘That’s _very_ good listening. I only said it once, in a list.’

‘I was _list_ -ening to your list,’ Eighty said, and got the giggles, which seemed to be a relief to Julian. He started encouraging the child in silliness, telling him jokes and stories and tickling him until Garak was afraid he would make him sick; one incident of vomiting in a day was quite enough for his patience. Eighty’s stomach seemed to be made of sterner stuff than Julian’s, and eventually they both calmed down and talked more sensibly, the boy lying sprawled across the young man’s outstretched legs and drawing patterns in the dirt with a twig as he explained about the different insects he had seen in the burnt garden and here, until it was time to go and beg for lunch.


	4. Endeavour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of discussion and a guest appearance by three bears. (Fairy Tales in Deep Space appears to have briefly infected this story.)

By late afternoon, when the dusty sky was orange and the shadows were long and low to the ground, they had completed the breaking up and digging over of the garden plot, and were thoroughly tired and dirty. Julian’s hands were blistered, and in one or two places the blisters had burst and were very sore.

‘I envy you,’ he said to Garak as they gathered up the tools. Garak had sent Eighty on before them to ask Moset to put the kettle on. ‘You don’t sweat, and your hands are much tougher than mine.’

‘Diddums.’

‘ _Diddums?_ Did you just _diddums_ me?’ Julian straightened up and gave Garak an incredulous look.

‘Well, really. You come down from your shiny ship for one day, do half a day’s work, spend most of your time _playing_...’

‘You really are in a rotten mood, Garak,’ Julian said, frowning.

‘I’m tired, and sore, and have been nothing _but_ tired and sore for months. You can beam back up tonight and have a hot shower. I can crawl back into my tent and have a cold stand-up sponge-bath. Your envying me is a trifle rich.’ There was no element of flirtation in this fight; he was sincerely fed up. If he had felt able to lift his arms above waist level he would have given Julian a shove.

‘All right, look, I’m sorry. That was a silly thing to say. I didn’t mean it. I don’t envy you any of this. I think you’re incredibly brave to do it.’ Julian edged closer to him and touched his shoulder awkwardly, and he felt himself weaken. ‘Let’s not argue.’

‘Sometimes I wish we just _could._ We used to have such lovely arguments. Do you remember?’

‘And debates, and discussions...’ Julian said wistfully. ‘You’ve left quite a hole in my life, you know. There’s nobody left on the station who’s so good for conversation. Well, there’s Morn, obviously, but with him it’s a question of getting a word in edgeways.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, I don’t know if you’ll want to, but I have guest quarters on the _Endeavour._ I could have stayed on the runabout I came in, but they’re very hospitable. Do you want to come up and have dinner with me? I think you could use a good meal. And you could have a proper shower, and get your clothes cleaned.’ His hand was still on Garak’s shoulder, resting there lightly.

Garak stood immobile and irresolute. There were any number of reasons to politely decline, not least that it was fairly shabby to take off for an evening’s comfort and leave Moset and Eighty to go to bed in the tent. But on the other hand there was the terrible, greedy _need_ for comfort, for respite, to just feel clean for a few hours. Julian’s hand pressed a little, shifted, almost a soothing rub.

‘And we can talk about what’s happened, and what we should do about it, in peace and quiet, and in private.’

‘That sounds reasonable,’ Garak said slowly.

‘Come on, then.’

Beaming up to the _Endeavour_ was a disorientating experience. He had been meeting with the aid officers, but only at ground level; he hadn’t actually been called up to any of the ships, and at times was inclined to take that as a slight. On the other hand, perhaps they were trying to be polite and considerate by coming to him. It hardly seemed important right now, in the bland, beige cosiness of a Galaxy-class ship. Their boots left little drifts of dust on the transporter room floor, which the officer at the controls looked at with distaste, pressing a button to summon a little vacuuming robot that scuttled out of the baseboard.

‘I have a bag of _filthy laundry_ , too,’ Garak said pugnaciously, before Julian hurried him out.

‘Behave yourself,’ he said, suppressing a smile as they got into the lift.

‘I believe _you_ said they were very hospitable.’

‘Behave.’ Julian let them into his temporary quarters, equally bland and beige in the style of ten years ago, enlivened by a large portrait of Sir Joseph Banks on one wall. ‘Leave your horrible, filthy laundry with me, and go and make the most of the bathroom. Well, the shower room; it _does_ have a real water shower but I didn’t quite rate a bathtub.’

‘I never said that it was horrible.’ As he entered the bathroom and the door closed behind him, Garak realised that he really was overtired. He hadn’t made a proper assessment of the main room at all; thinking about it now he only really remembered the portrait in its rather ostentatious gold frame, the bed in an alcove and Julian’s blue pyjamas thrown across the foot of the mattress. He had only observed the bed because the familiar pyjamas had caught his eye; he couldn’t have described it otherwise. All the usual things he would have noted, ways in and out, vantage points and places of concealment, useful objects, hazards - a blur. And none of it seemed to _matter._

He tried to take more careful notice of the bathroom, the moulded unit comprising mirror, washbasin and cabinets, Julian’s sonic toothbrush, shaver and cologne on the countertop, the toilet, the shower cubicle and towel rail. There was a small hatch in the ceiling, presumably for maintenance purposes, but he didn’t think he could get up through there without being both two sizes thinner and a great deal more flexible. There. Not completely past it. He could hear Julian moving about, emptying his laundry bag into the cleaning unit, the sound of a chair pulled back, body taking a seat, click and hum of some instrument - presumably healing the blisters on his hands with a little medical gadget.

Resigning himself to the loss of eavesdropping, he started the water and stripped out of his clothes, shedding more dust and dry dirt onto the clean beige floor, leaving them in a heap with his boots on top. The air was already slightly thickened and softened by steam, and he breathed it in gratefully. Stepping into the cubicle, he turned up his face and let the hot water spray over it. It wasn’t actually forceful enough to qualify as waterblasting, but it was still pleasant to imagine the spray forcing the itchy dust out of the fine lines and crevices between the scales around his eyes.

When he opened his eyes and looked down, there were dirty red-brown swirls in the water draining away. His hair was the worst culprit, almost solid with dirt. He was washing it, his eyes closed tight, when the bathroom door opened. He didn’t look, telling himself it was most likely that Julian only wanted to use the toilet, so he could tell himself that he was surprised when the shower door opened, Julian stepped in behind him and put his arms around him. What did surprise him was how he felt, physically, the sudden ache in his chest and the sting in his eyes and nose, on top of the expected rush of warmth.

‘I got fed up waiting,’ Julian said, and rested his chin on Garak’s shoulder.

‘I’m not at all sure you should be doing that.’

‘Oh?’

‘What happened to Lieutenant Dax?’ Not that he particularly liked Ezri Dax, who got on his nerves in an inconsequential, chirpy way, but it seemed the sort of thing Julian would normally consider, and if that had changed he was a little concerned.

‘Oh. We’re actually not together any more. Did I forget to say?’

‘You did.’

‘You gave me something rather more pressing to think about, I have to say.’

‘And yet here you are, pressing _me.’_

‘Don’t be like that. Here, I’ll wash your hair. You said I was good at that.’

Garak let his hands drop to his sides, wondering why he was being so weak tonight. It had to be a choice that he was making at some level, and if it was just because he was desperate to be close to Julian again, that was pathetic. But here he stood, letting Julian work at his hair, those kind, dextrous fingers kneading away at his scalp in the way that made his neck and shoulders go loose in spite of themselves, and all he wanted was to give up any thought of resistance and be taken care of. Could he get his back scrubbed? At present, that appealed to him more than anywhere else Julian might touch him.

‘I was wondering if I’d find you bruised all over,’ Julian remarked, nudging his head forward to rinse out the shampoo. ‘You walk as if someone’s beaten you up.’

‘As I said... I’m tired and sore. I haven’t been in any fights lately. I’m sorry to disappoint you.’

‘It doesn’t actually disappoint me to find that you’re not injured.’ A light kiss on the nape of his neck; he managed not to shiver.

‘Did you sneak into my shower just to find out if I was?’

‘No, it was dual purpose sneaking. To see if you were all right, and to try to feel you up a bit. I think I’ll need to wash your hair twice. Is _that_ all right?’

‘Yes. Provided that you scrub my back, too.’

‘Will you scrub mine?’ He could hear the smile in Julian’s voice.

‘Vigorously.’

It turned into lovemaking, of course, as he’d realised it would from the first, and the relief and comfort of that was huge. For a while, at least, nothing else mattered; the scope of his concerns narrowed to his body and Julian’s and the joyful ways they joined together. Afterwards Julian slept for a while, curled up beside him in the blessedly soft bed, while he lay wakeful, unable to relax in mind even if his body felt as if it had melted.

One of Julian’s hands lay on his chest, the fingers loosely curled, and he laid his own hand over it. He had once overheard one of Julian’s lady friends saying to one of _her_ friends something about his ‘surgeon’s hands’ and the two of them giggling as if that were devilishly sexy, which had struck him as odd. If he thought ‘surgeon’s hands’ he thought of hands that were dextrous, yes, but steady, clinical and utterly dispassionate, hands that incised and excised and sutured, not hands that stroked, kneaded, rubbed, hands that gripped and trembled in moments of ecstasy.

He turned Julian’s hand over and traced the lines on the palm with his fingertip. Humans and Cardassians shared an old superstition about the lines on the hand representing personality traits and future destiny, but each line stood for something different in the two systems. Whose hands did the boy have? Julian had said his. Pity, really.

He lay there, fruitlessly going over the situation in his head. He couldn’t say he loved the child, but he felt what he thought was a natural concern and solicitude for him. He was adamant that he could not leave him with Dr Moset, at any rate. It was difficult to see what other option there was. He, Garak, wasn’t a fit person to bring him up. Julian didn’t believe he was either. There was no institution or organisation within Cardassian society, even before the recent crisis, for the care of children whose natural parents were dead, unable or unfit to keep them. The expectation, if there were difficulties, was that someone else in the extended family would take them on, and the fact that not every child had an extended family willing and able to do that was politely ignored.

An alternative might be to find out what sort of care might be available for the child (Garak was making a deliberate effort not to use that degrading nickname in his thoughts) in the Federation. While born on Cardassia, perhaps he would be considered eligible for their social services because of Julian. Certainly they were rounding up the feral Cardassian children and trying to get them cleaned up, fed and properly grateful. Yet the thought of sending him away to be raised as if he were only Human appalled Garak.

 _If I were a different sort of person entirely,_ he wondered, _and prepared to bring him up myself, would it be good for him to be raised as if he were only Cardassian? Or should I try to include some Human business for balance? Does he need that? Could I do it properly, when I don’t believe in much of it myself? Would he need a teddy bear, for example? I think those things are so... creepy._

Julian stirred against him, rubbing his cheek on Garak’s shoulder before he opened his eyes. ‘Hallo. I’m glad you’re still here.’

‘We haven’t actually had that private conversation you lured me up here for.’

‘Oh. That one. Can we stave that off a little while longer? I’m still afterglowing.’ Julian snuggled down again, hiding his face in Garak’s neck.

‘Oh, I was in no hurry. Just lying here thinking.’

‘About what?’

‘About teddy bears, as it happens.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes. How strange they are. Bears and wolves, if I understand rightly, were both very dangerous predators in days of old when they roamed freely. So why are wolves presented to children as monsters, while bears are lovely cuddly toys to comfort you when you start sleeping away from your parents?’

‘Oh... well, you’ve sort of got things collapsed, historically... teddy bears are only from the nineteenth century on. They were named after Teddy Roosevelt. In the olden days bears were monsters too.’

‘In cautionary tales?’

‘Of course. I’ll tell you one. It’s longer than “The Boy that Cried Wolf,” but we’ve got time. All right. Once upon a time, there were three bears. A great big daddy bear, a middle-sized mummy bear, and a wee little baby bear.’

‘Are those their voices?’

‘Yes, it’s a very traditional part of the story. So don’t smirk. Anyway, they lived together in a house in the woods.’

‘They did _not._ Surely you mean a... a nest, or something. Do bears actually build houses?’

‘Of course not. Or nests. They sometimes live in caves. It’s a _story._ And one morning the bears got up, and Mummy Bear made porridge for their breakfast.’

‘Rampant anthropomorphism.’

‘Yes, we’re prone to it as a species. But when they tasted the porridge, it was much too hot, so they decided to go out for a morning walk and eat it when they got back. And while they were out, who should come along but Goldilocks?’

‘Who indeed? And who is Goldilocks?’

‘Goldilocks was a very pretty, very spoilt little girl, so called because of her golden-blonde hair. She had parents who indulged her every whim, and she took whatever she wanted without the least consideration for anyone else. Goldilocks came prancing through the woods, saw the bears’ house, and decided to go in. Didn’t even knock, just opened the door, which unwisely, the bears had not locked.

‘Inside, she found that nobody was around, but there were three chairs by the fireside, a great big chair, a middle-sized chair, and a wee little chair. She felt like a rest, so she clambered into the great big chair, but after squrming around a bit concluded “This chair is too hard!” Next she tried the middle-sized chair, which the mummy bear kept piled with cushions, but declared “This chair is too soft!” Finally she sat down in the wee little chair and found that it was _just right._ Unfortunately, Goldilocks was considerably heavier than the baby bear and when she shifted her weight the chair broke into bits.’

‘The little vandal. Who’s the monster in this story?’

‘Shh. Goldilocks picked herself up and looked around, and now she saw the table where the bears’ breakfast lay. She ran over and, being a greedy little beast, helped herself to the biggest bowl. But she spat the mouthful straight back, because this porridge was too hot. Next she tried the middle-sized bowl, but spat that back too, because this porridge was too cold. Finally she tried the wee little bowl, and she ate it all up and licked it clean, because this porridge was _just right._ Yes, I know. I always assume the bowls were made out of different materials and the big one was very well insulated.’

‘You know, I found the protagonist of the wolf story rather sympathetic. He was bored and lonely, and tried to use his wits to solve his problem. Goldilocks, on the other hand, is repellent.’

‘I know. But a lot of children like her anyway because she’s pretty and adventurous, I suppose, exploring in the woods by herself. So once Goldilocks was full of porridge, she started to feel rather sleepy, and went in search of a bed. Upstairs she found three. First she tried the great big bed, which had a special firm mattress for the daddy bear’s back. That bed was too hard. Then she tried the middle-sized bed, which again reflected the mummy bear’s passion for cushions. That bed was too soft. Finally she tried the wee little bed, and that was - can you guess?’

‘Just right?’

‘Exactly. And it was stronger than the chair downstairs had been, so it didn’t break and she snuggled down and went right to sleep. And a little while after that, the bears came back from their walk.’

‘Aha! Now there’ll be a reckoning.’

‘Quite. They entered the house and found the disarray in their sitting room. In his big gruff voice, the daddy bear rumbled “Someone’s been sitting in my chair!” Discovering the bumprint in her favourite cushion, the mummy bear exclaimed “Someone’s been sitting in _my_ chair!” And the baby bear squeaked in dismay, “Someone’s been sitting in _my_ chair and they’ve broken it to bits!”’

‘How could the daddy bear tell?’

‘Bears have a keen sense of smell. Next they went to the table, where the daddy bear rumbled “Someone’s been eating my porridge!” and the mummy bear exclaimed “Someone’s been eating _my_ porridge!’ And the baby bear squeaked in dismay, “Someone’s been eating _my_ porridge, and they’ve eaten it all up!’”

‘The baby bear is getting the worst of it, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. The mummy and daddy bears were comforting him when they heard a creak from upstairs, as Goldilocks rolled over in her sleep. They all froze and looked at each other. _The intruder was still in the house._ Reminding themselves that they were, after all, bears, they stealthily went upstairs. Creeping into the bedroom, the daddy bear rumbled “Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.” The mummy bear whispered “Someone’s been sleeping in _my_ bed!’ And as they gathered around the third bed, the baby bear squeaked “Someone’s been sleeping in _my_ bed - and she’s _still here!”_ And at that - _Goldilocks woke up!’_

‘And the bears ate her up?’

‘I’m afraid they all just growled at her ferociously. Goldilocks screamed in terror, dived out the window, landed with a tremendous bump, and ran all the way home. The bears tidied up and made themselves some more porridge, and the daddy bear mended the broken chair and put a lock on the front door. Other than that inconvenience, they lived happily ever after. And from that day on, everyone remarked on what a considerate girl Goldilocks was - that she would never intrude where she didn’t belong, touch other people’s things without permission, or take a crumb that didn’t belong to her. The end.’

‘You know, I think I actually like that a good deal better than the wolf one. Cautionary, certainly, with the vicarious horror of the great dangerous beasts looming over the little girl, but she escapes to learn from the experience and no innocent parties suffer in order for her to be punished.’

‘Oh, Garak! Were you upset about the sheep being eaten?’

‘The _sheep_ hadn’t told any lies, you know.’ Garak stretched out his arms, then laced his fingers behind his head. ‘Yes, I quite like that story. It features some telling details. The father bear’s hard chair and mattress, for example, to support his bad back - that suggests a life of hard physical labour in order to support his family. And the mother’s cushions imply both that she provides a comfortable home, and that her husband has sacrificed his own comfort so that she can do so. While the little bear, well, everything around him is _just right,_ his own little chair and bowl and bed, perfectly secure in the care of his parents. Until Goldilocks invades their home, that security has never been disrupted. The Bears are a model family.’

‘I love it when you over-analyse things.’ Julian gave Garak a little squeeze around his waist and hooked his ankle around one of his.

‘That’s the sort of home life a child should have. That deep, warm security. The knowledge that even if something bad happens, Mother and Father can deal with it and everything will be all right. The chair will be mended, more porridge will be made...’ He stopped, and sighed. ‘How can he ever have that?’

‘You don’t mean Baby Bear any more, do you?’ Julian asked, his expression growing more serious.

‘I don’t want to call him Eighty. Hateful name.’

‘I mean...’ Julian said, and trailed off. ‘Well... I had security when I was little. I had very nurturing, protective parents. Overprotective, really. You can go too far. Everything they did, they meant for the best - they wanted me to be safe and happy and successful. And they still ended up alienating me horribly, because I couldn’t bear the decisions they’d made for me, the way it made me feel that none of my good qualities were really _mine,_ that I was a fraud and was going to be found out and everything I’d hoped for in life would be ruined. I’ve forgiven them now, but I’m still not really comfortable with them.’

‘I don’t think they did too terrible a job. You’ve turned out very nice - or do you think that’s in spite of them?’

‘I don’t know. How can you ever really know? How can you separate what you are by your own efforts, from what your early circumstances made you? And how can I ever know what’s really, naturally me and what’s just an enhancement? Or a side-effect of enhancement? And _he’s_ got to inherit that. Though at least it’s not his parents’ direct doing. At least we won’t have that particular thing between us.’

‘But then, perhaps it will hurt him more that we didn’t want him. We didn’t even know about him.’

‘Oh, God...’ Julian screwed his eyes shut. ‘I need a drink if I’m going to talk about this. A proper drink that doesn’t taste like rubbing alcohol. What do you want?’ He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

‘Kanar, please.’ He watched as Julian walked to the replicator, wanting to re-memorise everything about his body, to have something to keep with him after they parted. Julian returned with a glass of kanar for him and a short tumbler of something amber for himself, which he sipped moodily, sitting cross-legged on the bed beside Garak.

‘Right,’ Julian said after a moment. ‘Let’s see if we can agree on first principles. One, we want this kid to be all right. He’s a nice little boy who deserves a good upbringing. ’

‘Definitely.’

‘Two, we feel a moral obligation to sort something out for him.’

‘Not so definite. The morality of the situation is nebulous to say the least.’

‘Shelve two for now, then, but three: leaving him with Dr Moset is not an option. He doesn’t love him, isn’t treating him like family, and is all in all a bit creepy.’

‘I am back with you.’ Now that his initial horror and anger had subsided, Garak had decided that while he would still kill Moset in the end, he would wait for an opportune time and ensure that he had plausible deniability. There was no reason to tell Julian about it; what he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell anyone else, even by accident.

‘Because if he grows up like that, it’s going to damage him. If he isn’t loved himself, he won’t know how to love other people. He’s doing better than I would have expected on that front.’

‘He had a nurse when he was a baby. I asked about that on their first night here. She used to hold him and so on. He wouldn’t have thrived physically otherwise. He wasn’t encouraged to bond with her as with a mother, though, and she left Dr Moset’s employment about a year ago.’

‘And someone loved you, didn’t they?’ Julian’s gaze was dark and astute.

‘Someone did.’ Garak sipped his kanar, resting the glass on his chest afterwards. He hoped Julian wouldn’t press him for details. They were not comfortable memories. ‘You love much more easily and... _fluently_ than I do, Julian. You could certainly provide for him that way. I don’t want you to doubt that.’

‘I think you’re selling yourself short.’ Julian fell silent for a few moments, swirling the golden liquid around in his glass. ‘I’ve been thinking... about the whole genetic enhancement thing. About how other people might see him, because of it. How they might try to use him.’

‘Moset thought he might breed a sort of new Jem’Hadar from him,’ Garak recalled, shuddering slightly.

‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Not just for Cardassia. There are elements in the Federation that would home in on him for that too. You know, we’ve got form for that sort of thing. Back in... I think it was the Third World War, or it might have been the Eugenics War, I always get them mixed up. Or the Post-Atomic Horror. Bloody awful period of history, and hard to be definite about because the records got so messed up. We actually had our own military forces controlled by performance-enhancing drugs. They wouldn’t have died without them, it wasn’t as extreme as ketracel white, but they were addicted to them and withdrawal would have been horrendous, so it kept them very loyal.’ He drank again, glumly.

‘And I’ve started to worry, sometimes, that we might begin to slide back towards that kind of thing. The Federation is so big now. History shows that whenever empires have got too large - and I know we’re not exactly an empire, but they’re the main precedent for this type of thing - they’ve overextended their resources, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, barbarism starts to creep in. And people start to justify things that are quite against the original spirit of the thing, in order to preserve it.’

‘You never would have thought that before you met me,’ Garak pointed out. The same beautiful face, but there was a darkness in the eyes that there had never been in those days, a grimness about the mouth when Julian thought such things.

‘Don’t give yourself all the credit for my disillusionment,’ Julian said, with a glint of humour and a wry smile. ‘A certain Mr Sloan deserves some.’

‘I wish you’d told me he was creeping into your room at night. I could have lain in wait for him and given him... something to think about.’

‘That sort of thing was only fun when _you_ did it.’

‘He didn’t ever...’

‘No, my darling, that was a privilege reserved entirely for you.’ Julian lay down beside him again and kissed his cheek. ‘Garak, what are we going to do? We can’t ask someone else to take responsibility for all of _that._ I don’t think we can even _tell_ them all of that. We’d be putting them in too much danger. Him too. He’s worth far more alive than dead, obviously, but there _is_ cloning and an interested party might decide it’s better to start from scratch with a new model.’

‘But you and I,’ Garak said slowly, ‘with our greater understanding of the situation, could protect him.’

‘At least we’d have a better chance than most people. You, especially, with your advanced knowledge of dirty tricks and skulduggery.’

‘And you, I suppose, could calculate all the probabilities of different eventualities.’

‘Well, probability isn’t everything. It’s just part of the picture, but it can be useful to know.’

‘Or it could drive you mad with worry and fear. Especially if you grew to love him.’

‘I think I love him already, Garak.’

‘You can’t really. I don’t believe in loving without knowing.’

Julian sighed. ‘I know. Do you know how you think he’s so like me, and I think he’s so like you? I don’t know about you, but I realised I think that because when I look at him, what I notice most are all the features of the person I love, reproduced in a new little person. So some of how I feel about him is transferred from you. It’s not the same _kind_ of love, there’s nothing sexual in it, but there’s... devotion, I suppose. Do you know what I mean at all?’

‘I do,’ Garak admitted, thinking of the boy’s eyes.

‘And I do love you so much. It’s never worn off. It’s never gone away. It just stays curled around my heart.’

‘You make it sound like an internal parasite.’

‘All right, I won’t try to be poetic. Do you feel at all like that about me? Do you ever feel as if we could make a go of it together, if we really tried?’

‘Trying to stay together for a child’s sake is not a good idea. I have only a distant outsider’s view of marriage but I do know that is more or less poison to it.’

‘Which isn’t really an answer to the question. I’ll ask a simpler one. Did you love me?’

Garak closed his eyes. ‘I loved you. I loved you entirely.’

‘ _Do_ you love me?’

‘Julian...’

‘Do you love me?’

Fighting down panic, feeling cornered, Garak said, quietly and steadily, ‘Yes. I do.’

‘And do you think that now, when Cardassia has changed so much, it might be safer than it was then for you to love someone?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Julian, I can’t risk - I have to be able to do something for Cardassia, and I can’t risk _you._ I wish above all things that you could be happy with me, but I would still be content if you were just _happy_.’

‘You know,’ Julian said softly, ‘that practically all your old enemies are dead.’

‘I’ll make new ones. Better ones!’

‘And you know that, yes, I’m younger than you, yes, I have less experience, but I am still an adult who can decide for himself whether he’s prepared to take a risk. Especially when it’s to protect something, or someone important. I don’t think I can take care of him by myself, but I think we could do it together.’

‘It’s all such a mess,’ Garak groaned. ‘Families aren’t supposed to begin this way. You can’t simply take two men who haven’t even lived together before, and a little boy of four that we’ve just met, and say we are going to be the daddies and you’re going to be the baby and we will all be happy together. What if it falls apart horribly? What if you and I _can’t_ live together, and within months we’re telling the poor child no, sorry, this isn’t going to be a family after all?’

‘On the other hand, what if we live together rather well? Because I think we could.’

‘Oh, so you’ve calculated the probability of that as well? There must be ten thousand things you don’t know about me and can’t take into account.’

‘Yes. But I know the two main things: I love you and you love me.’

‘That is simplistic and sentimental and naïve and so typically, _facilely_ human.’

‘And it’s your duty. To your son and to your state. To do the right thing, to establish a family, to give him security and guidance and bring him up so that he becomes a good and equally dutiful person.’ Julian’s voice grew sharper, almost commanding, not bad for a man with no clothes on.

‘I should marry a good woman, then,’ Garak snapped back, stung but impressed despite himself.

‘She wouldn’t be his mother, and I’m his father. Other father. He wants me, too. And I’ve got rights.’

‘Did you bring me up here planning to spring all this on me? After first softening me up with your sexual wiles?’

‘No! That’s the thing, it’s all been shaking down in my mind and I’m just working out what I feel about it now. Actually, having a good shag helped the process along - it cleared my head.’ Julian sat up, an agitated movement. ‘This can work, Garak. I’m not indentured to DS9. I’ll volunteer for the aid mission. If they try to send me somewhere else, I’ll resign my commission and just be a plain medical doctor here. Goodness knows I’d have enough work! The state of the people here! And I can help. Obviously this world doesn’t mean to me what it does to you, it never could, but I do want to _help. And_ I’m one of the few Federation doctors who actually knows his way around a Cardassian. I’m wasted if I’m _not_ here. I’d have seen that before if I weren’t all caught up thinking I’d live happily ever after with Ezri.’

‘So now you think you’ll live happily ever after with _me._ Is that any more realistic?’

‘But I _don’t_ think I’ll live happily ever after with you. I think we’ll fight. We’ll bicker for fun, and we’ll argue for real, but we’ll make up in the end because we need each other so much. We won’t always be happy. This will be really hard. No offence, but it’s horrible down there. I’m not looking forward to living in that tent. But it will be _ours_ , and we’ll make things better bit by bit. And we’ll take care of our son. We’ll do everything we can to make _him_ happy.’

‘We can’t do anything like a trial period,’ Garak said warningly. ‘You realise that. A child can’t be expected to understand. If we began we would have to go on, in earnest, with no way out.’

‘I know.’

‘Incidentally, do you know that until about the age of seven, Cardassian children frequently sleep with their parents? All in the one big bed?’

‘What?’ Julian said, faltering. ‘What on earth do they do about sex?’

‘They have to wait for a night when the children don’t join them, or be more flexible about when and where they attempt it.’

‘Well - well, all right, I can cope with that. I mean, it’ll only be three years. He’ll grow out of it, won’t he?’

‘Well, he might need longer. He’s got to catch up.’

‘Even so.’ Julian rallied, and sat up straighter. ‘And we’ll have to be flexible about it anyway, if we all live in a bloody tent. We’ll find a way to make it work. Come on. Are you with me?’

‘I refuse to decide tonight. I have to sleep on it, at the very least.’

‘Right. Agreed. You can tell me your decision tomorrow. No rush, any time tomorrow. Now, would you like some help clearing your head?’


	5. Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a name is chosen. Rather short, but I wanted to post something tonight.

Garak woke again at some indeterminate hour, alone. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep here, but it had just been too tempting, and he had slept so _well_ with Julian’s arm around him and their legs intertwined. He lifted his head and looked around, finding that Julian was sitting in a chair by the window, wrapped up in a bathrobe, looking out at the stars and nursing a cup of tea. He rolled out of bed and went over, leaning his arms on the back of the chair and bending to kiss Julian’s cheek. 

‘Hallo,’ Julian said. ‘I’m thinking about... everything, I suppose. How on earth to bring up a child. People generally have nine months or so to figure out their approach. Or if they’re adopting one, they’ve made a plan. I’ve never thought seriously about it before. I know all about it from a doctor’s point of view, what vaccinations they need, nutrition and exercise and bedwetting and so on, but what are we going to do if, say, he does something naughty? And don’t say lock him in a cupboard. You know that wasn’t good for you.’

‘In any case, I haven’t got a cupboard big enough.’

‘And what if he has horrible attachment disorders? He seems all right at the moment but he’s probably on his best behaviour. He may be quite neurotic really.’

‘I’m sure he’s no worse than, oh, say, me.’ Garak straightened up with a slight grunt.

‘You shouldn’t make noises like that. You’re having problems with your back, aren’t you? I noticed it when we were in bed but I didn’t want to put you off by commenting on it.’ Julian got up and walked around behind Garak, running his hands down over his back, investigating.

‘If you’re going to stand beind me holding my hips...’

‘Don’t be evasive. I’m looking for curvature. Right, I’m getting my tricorder and sorting you out.’

‘I am a broken-down old wreck. How can I be an energetic small child’s father?’ Garak grudgingly tolerated having his spine scanned.

‘There’s nothing wrong here except muscle strain. No arthritis, nothing wrong with your discs. I can have you right as rain by morning.’ In a faintly bullying way, Julian guided him back to lie face-down on the bed, then set about his back with a variety of medical gadgets which produced some quite bizarre squishing and pounding sensations before yielding relief. ‘There. This makes me feel reassuringly competent. I’ll need to keep working over the area for about half an hour to get the full effect, so be patient.’

‘Yes, doctor.’

‘There’s one little bonus of this whole arrangement - you’ll have me on call to look after you. Prevention is better than cure, though - we’ll have to see about getting you a firm daddy-bear mattress.’

‘Not too hard for you, I trust?’

‘Fortunately for you, Iprefer a firm mattress, as long as I can also have soft pillows.’

‘Then -’

‘I vehemently reject the role of Mummy Bear. All these changes are quite challenging enough to my sense of identity without any sort of gender shenanigans. It will just have to be a firmly two-daddy household. Tenthold.’

‘If he calls us both Daddy we won’t know which one he means.’

‘Do Cardassian children even say “Daddy”?’

‘“Papa” is more common.’

‘There you are then. You’ll just be Papa and I’ll be Daddy. Problem solved. That’s encouraging. What next? Oh, of course. What are _we_ going to call _him?’_

‘That’s a far worse problem. We have _names,_ after all. Papa and Daddy are just... additions. Actually choosing a person’s name, for his whole life, is a very daunting prospect to me. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were a baby; babies don’t understand what you call them so there’s no possibility of disappointing them with your taste.’

‘You won’t disappoint him. All right; we’ll start at the end. Is he going to be a Bashir or a Garak?’

‘If we’re to live on Cardassia, it should be Garak. Having an alien surname would only compound the social difficulties he’ll have. I hope you understand.’

‘Entirely - although, in that case, could we have Bashir as a middle name? It would make my parents happy, at any rate.’ He stopped talking, and a moment later, doubled over and put his head down on Garak’s back. Garak could feel a long, gusty exhalation against his shoulderblades that grew into a despairing groan. ‘Ohhhhhh God oh God oh God. I’m going to have to tell my parents.’

‘You don’t _have_ to.’

‘I think there’s been _more_ than enough lying and secrecy in this family,’ Julian said, still leaning on his back.

‘Well, why break with a fine old tradition on both sides?’

‘I’m just going to have to... well, I’ll put it in a letter. I’m not breaking it to them live. Some things are just too awkward even for me. And my mother’s probably going to ululate or something when she hears she’s got a grandchild. All right. Back on track, his name will be Something Bashir Garak. We need to decide what the Something will be. Are there any names you like?’ Julian pulled himself together, sat up, and resumed his ministrations to Garak’s back.

Garak thought about it. ‘I’ve never really had strong feelings about names, one way or another. I only like or dislike them as I’ve liked or disliked people I’ve known with those names.’

‘Maybe we could think of a name that’s both Cardassian and Human. For example, Erik, that sounds quite Cardassian.’

‘Erik is an archaic word, a very _coarse_ word, for a woman’s genitals.’

‘Oh dear. Sort of like calling your son Twat?’

‘Worse.’

 _‘Oh_ dear. All right then, not that. I didn’t particularly like it anyway, I was just looking for a compromise.’

‘A name that I like, because I liked the person it belonged to, is Tolan.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. Tolan was the name of my father’s housekeeper’s brother, a groundskeeper. He was kind to me when I was small, as was his sister. I suppose it’s thanks to them that I don’t have what you call an attachment disorder.’

‘Hmm. I like the sound of Tolan too. Here’s my suggestion. You got surname rights. Can I have first name rights? And make Tolan a middle name?’

‘How many middle names does one child need?’

‘Two isn’t excessive, especially when one is really an emergency back-up surname.’

‘Does this mean that you’ve thought of a first name you’re keen on?’

‘Well, I’ve just remembered that I once told Vic I’d name my first-born after him, and I was only joking at the time, but I think I really like that. Victor. It’s a strong, simple, old-fashioned name, it’s Roman like Julian, it has a positive meaning, it turns into a nice appealing nickname - my uncle Vikram will insist on thinking it’s in honour of him, that’s just what he’s like - what do you think?’

‘Victor Tolan Bashir Garak.’

‘Yes, and I did run it through my head to make sure the initials didn’t spell anything awful. I think we’re safe. Unless you’re going to tell me “Victor” is Cardassian for arsehole or child-molester or something.’

‘I don’t think it’s Cardassian for anything. I trust “Tolan” doesn’t mean something equally distasteful in a Human language?’

‘Not that I know of. And when you contract it to Victor Garak, that sounds all right, doesn’t it? It’s half and half, just like him.’

‘That does seem fitting.’

‘We should sleep on it. I mean, he’ll need a name sooner rather than later, but it’s also not something we should rush.’ Julian ran his hand up and down Garak’s back, as if inspecting his handiwork. ‘All soothed?’

‘It feels remarkably improved.’ Garak sat up and stretched cautiously, and finding himself whole, wrapped his arms around Julian, holding him close, assuring himself that he was as strong and reliable as ever - thin, yes, but resilient like bamboo or willow. That was the thing to remember about Julian, that he would bend but not break; it was all right to lean on him. Giving himself permission did not seem to make it any easier to do. 

‘Are you all right?’ Julian asked hesitantly.

‘Physically I’m much better. Mentally, I’m feeling slightly fragile. I just don’t express it as openly as you do. So if you’ll allow me to cling for a few minutes...’

‘Of course I’ll allow you. For as long as you want, and whenever you want.’ Julian tightened his arms around him, and rubbed one hand up and down between his shoulderblades. ‘We need to look after each other as well as him.’

‘Yes, but I think he’d better not see us falling apart too often. That’s not conducive to a sense of childhood security.’ He lowered his head on Julian’s shoulder, closing his eyes. ‘Far too much has changed far too quickly. I was entirely unprepared to acquire a family overnight.’

‘God, I hope it’s going to be all right.’

‘If he grows up to be depraved we’ll just blame Moset. The damage was done.’

‘Not too much damage, please, not too much damage.’

‘And if he grows up to be reasonably well adjusted we’ll take full credit for it. It will be due entirely to our loving kindness and firm guidance.’

‘I can teach him to play tennis, and cricket, and you can sew him little rompers and... read him _The Never-Ending Sacrifice_ to put him to sleep at night.’

‘Nonsense; it’s too advanced for children. I’ll read him lots of nice Cardassian nursery stories.’

‘I’d like to read those before you do, just to be sure that I approve.’

‘I definitely don’t approve of your stories.’

‘Then you can vet them too, I promise. And I’ll never tell him the one about the scissor-man who cuts off children’s thumbs -’

 _‘Cuts off children’s thumbs?’_

‘Cuts off children’s thumbs if they suck them,’ Julian confirmed, starting to giggle.

 _‘Why_ is it that _my_ people have this reputation for being cruel and cold, while _yours_ somehow have a warm cuddly image?’

‘To be fair,’ Julian said, his laughter gently vibrating through his chest into Garak’s, ‘we don’t tell that _particular_ story very much any more, except as an example of how unenlightened we _used_ to be.’

‘What next? Children, if you spend too long on the toilet, a big toothy snake will come up the pipe and bite you on the bottom?’

‘Oh, I was _sure_ that would happen, and nobody told me it would. I thought of it on my own. And if I was still in the bath when my mother pulled the plug out, I would get sucked into the whirlpool and go down the drain. And if I got out of bed in the hours of darkness, something terrible underneath would reach out and grab my ankle with a scaly claw, and drag me under to a grisly death, so I had to hold onto Kukalaka as tight as I could and take a flying leap from the edge of the bed to land out of range, and then _if_ I survived the toilet snake, I’d have to take a run-up from the doorway and leap back _into_ bed.’ He rubbed his cheek against Garak’s shoulder. ‘I suppose I should give Kukalaka to him... to Victor. I don’t know if I can quite bring myself to...’

‘If you can bear to?’

‘You _must_ be tired. Kukalaka’s such a _good_ bear, though, and I’m sure he could help Victor overcome any traumas he’s been through.’ Drawing Garak with him, Julian lay down and pulled the covers up over them.

‘Perhaps he should have a _new_ bear. Because while I am sure Kukalaka is the best of bears, he has been very well loved and I am not sure he can withstand another child’s affection.’

‘That’s a point. Much more surgery and he’ll be like a sock made up only of darns. A nice, new, reinforced teddy bear, then, that’s never had one of its eyes gnawed off in a moment of anxiety.’

‘Gnawed off?’

‘I think we’ve established that my childhood was a time of arcane terrors. One takes one’s comfort where one can. I think I was watching _Bambi._ A film which I am sure you will not want Victor to watch until he is at least twenty-one.’

‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. Not morning yet. Let’s try to squeeze in a little bit of a sleep before then.’


	6. Validation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MUSH, THIS IS MUSH  
> still I enjoyed writing it

Julian woke before Garak in the morning, although he felt groggy from the broken night. Neither of them had slept for more than a couple of hours continuously, and he wasn’t really surprised. They had forgotten dinner entirely in the night’s jumble of reunion-sex, love, anxiety, comfort and confusion, so he was hungry too. He lay gazing at the back of Garak’s head and neck, feeling absurdly tender about the way his smooth inky hair was ruffled by the pillow, his thoughts a mixture of profound gladness to be close to him again, and bewildered trepidation at what was to come. 

Exactly how mad were they to be trying this? To try to get back together (or properly together for the first time) purely because Victor had entered the picture, to try to form a family so that he could have the childhood that might prevent him growing up to be a deeply unhappy person - and although they hadn’t voiced it directly, Julian was sure they were both aware of the risk that Victor could become an extremely dangerous person. If he didn’t learn to love and value and empathise with other people, if he withdrew into himself for lack of affectionate connections with others, if he dwelt on the idea that he was different and superior because of his genetic enhancements... what if too much damage had already been done? What if all this made him into a sociopath?

Depending on a variety of unknowable factors, he might rise to be a sort of Cardassian Khan, or on the other hand might just be an unpleasant loner, or anything in between. There was so much Julian wanted for Victor, friends and love and accomplishments, but he had very little idea how to ensure those outcomes in a real-life, day-by-day way. At the same time, he kept catching himself slipping into rosy, cosy imaginings of their family life (always transposed to a neat little house rather than the tent, whose inside he hadn’t even seen yet) and warning himself not to expect too much.

And this bed-sharing business had him slightly worried. Of course children crawled into bed with their parents, he’d done it himself when he was little and had a bad dream that Kukalaka alone couldn’t banish, or just because it was Saturday morning and he wanted to snuggle in between them and talk about what they were going to do with the day. Usually they would go to a museum, a zoo, a park, something fun but also educational, and he would dash from one display to the next and read the labels and signs aloud to his parents, or when there was no label or sign, they would look for someone to ask, or when all else failed, make something up together. He’d had a lovely time.

The problem with memories from that time was, although he had genuinely been happy, they were always overshadowed by the knowledge that it had all been founded on lies and crime. The only reason he’d been so bright and eager and exhilarated by all that he was learning was that they’d paid someone to fiddle about in his DNA, because he wasn’t good enough. 

Turning from that painful thought, it wasn’t as if he and Garak would be able to take Victor on jolly family outings like that anyway. The museums and parks of Cardassia Prime were in ruins. They would rebuild, of course, but Victor would be quite big by the time they were back to normal. Perhaps Julian could take him on a holiday to Earth - but how could he justify that to Garak, who was so dedicated to Cardassian reconstruction that he was living in a tent and dressing like a scarecrow? It had really been a shock to see him in that shed, his dapper Garak looking as if he were going down to his allotment. Could he sort of... ameliorate that position, not just because he would appreciate more comfort for himself, but because it would be a better life for Victor, without earning Garak’s contempt?

At least he had strong justification for bringing in a good bed, for the sake of Garak’s back. That would be one comfort. And a little bed for Victor - because perhaps if he had a nice bed of his own he wouldn’t be too keen to climb in with his parents? Sleeping with them for the whole night just seemed excessive. Normally when couples had children or adopted them they had been together for a while; they weren’t in a honeymoon or second honeymoon phase where frankly they wanted to be all over each other at every opportunity. _But then,_ he told himself, _revise your expectations - you can’t expect to have fantastic energetic oh-God-I-love-you-and-I-can’t-believe-you’re-really-going-to-be-mine-now sex_ in a tent, _in a row of other tents - think of the neighbours, let alone the kid._

He kissed the nape of Garak’s neck, pressing his nose into the smooth black hair above. The skin under his lips felt like very fine kid leather. Garak had very little personal smell to speak of, but his hair still had a faint whiff of the shampoo he’d used, and of Julian’s own smell that had rubbed off onto him. Noticing that always sent a little charge of warmth down into his groin, and he realised that he was really going to have trouble reconciling the idea of himself as a father with how he saw himself as a lover. The idea of himself and Garak mixed together had always been, well, an erotic one, and now it had a completely different meaning through Victor, who wasn’t even conceived by sexual means. Did people who’d had children the old-fashioned way ever look at them and think about the sex that had produced them, feel the sexual bond with their partner was deepened by that, or would that be really weird? Perhaps he could ask O’Brien one day. If they were both very, very drunk.

Garak stirred and rolled over to hug him, engulfing him in heavy warmth. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured into the side of Julian’s neck.

‘Good morning, my darling.’

‘I’ve never understood your calling me that. I don’t think I seem like anyone’s darling. Might raise eyebrows.’

‘Well, I could try to change it to “my love” or something, but “darling” was just what came out. And I only ever say it in private, so does it matter?’

‘Mm. Not much. Are you going to call me that in front of Victor?’

‘Would it bother you if I did?’

‘I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be private then.’

‘Perhaps I’ll only whisper it in your ear. _My darling._ Like that.’

‘Actually, if you did that in private too I would enjoy it very much.’ Garak nuzzled into Julian’s neck before lifting his head with a sigh. ‘We should go back.’

‘There’s no hurry.’ Julian stroked Garak’s hair, guiding his head back down to rest forehead-to-forehead with him, the tips of their noses brushing.

‘The longer we stay, the harder it will be to leave.’

‘You should write that in the visitors’ book before we go.’

‘Do they actually have a visitors’ book?’

‘I have no idea. On the bright side, once we’re all settled you can roll over and hug me like this every morning.’ He moved his head gently, rubbing his nose against Garak’s.

‘There might be a small child in the way, getting squashed.’

‘Small children are resilient and rubbery. He’ll spring back into shape once we unsquash him.’

‘I hope so. I can’t get up if you stay twined around me like this.’

‘That’s exactly my plan. For a while, anyway.’

 

To Garak’s surprise, Julian held his hand on the walk back from the transport centre in the aid station. 

‘It’s for moral support,’ Julian said in answer to his questioning look, ‘and besides, I’ve always thought it would be rather nice to walk around hand in hand with you. So I’m sure you can indulge my sentimentality on that little point.’ He squeezed Garak’s hand and gave him a little smile. 

‘Oh, it’s quite all right. I agree; rather nice. And the moral support is appreciated.’ They had agreed to start explaining things to Victor today - perhaps they would even get around to telling him they had tentatively decided to call him Victor. The boy himself was on the path in front of the red tent, drawing in the dirt with a long stick. Garak cringed inwardly to see what a grubby little urchin he looked - and that was even though he had clearly washed his face and hands that morning. When he noticed them approaching his face lit up and he ran to meet them, stopping just short of running into their legs, then hopped from one foot to the other beaming and juggling his stick from hand to hand.

‘Hello! Did you stay on the starship all night? Is it really, really big?’

‘Enormous,’ Julian confirmed. ‘It’s like a whole town in space. You’ll probably get a chance to visit one someday. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. I caught a lizard in the toilet at bedtime last night but his tail came off and he ran off without it. I’ve still got his tail. I was worried I’d killed him but Dr Moset says he’ll be all right and it will grow back. Do you want to see it? It kept wiggling for a while!’ He dug the now slightly withered-looking tail out of his tunic pocket and displayed it to Julian, who crouched down to inspect it and look suitably impressed.

‘He wasn’t actually _in_ the toilet, was he?’ Garak asked, bending to take a look.

‘No, he was on the wall next to it. He was going _thlip thlip_ with his tongue and going for the bugs that come to the lights.’

‘Our camp’s ablution block is quite palatial,’ Garak told Julian wryly, and saw his eyebrows twitch while the rest of his face remained politely immobile.

‘What’s palatial?’ Victor asked.

‘Like a palace. I’m afraid I was being sarcastic.’

‘Have you ever been to the toilet in a palace?’

‘Yes, actually. It was years ago, and it was very grand. I wasn’t really supposed to be there, but then, how often do you have a chance like that? In fact, I have a confession to make. There was a little pile of embroidered hand towels, and they were so beautiful, I pocketed the one I used.’

‘I’m sure you did,’ Julian said, looking at him skeptically. ‘And I bet you used it to wipe off everything you’d touched.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t have been considerate to leave the place messy. But of course, it’s wrong to steal, even if you do tidy up after yourself,’ he added hastily for the boy’s benefit.

‘You could send it back,’ Victor suggested. ‘And write a note saying sorry.’

‘Unfortunately, I don’t have it any more. But if I ever do get the opportunity to apologise, I certainly will.’ He looked at Julian, who was giving him the hairy eyeball. ‘My dear doctor, I have never claimed to be a role model.’

‘Are you a doctor and a lieutenant too?’ Victor asked Julian.

‘Well, yes, yes I am.’

 _‘Oh,’_ said Victor, with a look of ill-concealed cunning that made Garak feel awfully fond of him. It didn’t matter now if the boy was piecing it together for himself. He might even drop a few more hints if he felt like it.

‘How’s Dr Moset this morning?’ he asked blandly.

‘He’s talking to a man,’ Victor said vaguely, pointing away down the path. 

‘And he left you here by yourself?’ Julian asked, frowning.

‘I’m being good!’ Victor said hastily. ‘I did draw on the ground just a little bit but I can rub it out, you won’t be able to tell!’

‘Oh, I know you’re being good. I just don’t want you to be lonely.’

Garak took a couple of steps over to the scratchings on the path. They were elaborate patterns of intersecting lines and spirals. As well as the lines and dots he could make with the end of the stick, Victor had been experimenting with the way he could make a smooth patch by sweeping with the side of it, and with patterns of his own footprints. One shoe had a small hole in the sole that left a spot in the print, and he had been using that for effect too. Garak felt more confident in judging literature than visual art, but he thought this might show talent. That was an interesting possibility. On the other hand, clearly the boy needed new shoes without delay. He didn’t think he could add ‘cobbler’ to his CV, so that was another thing to ask for at the aid station.

‘I can rub it out,’ Victor said anxiously, seeing his close attention to the drawings.

‘No, leave it there; I rather like it. Of course, people will walk over it, so it won’t last long. Perhaps we can get you some drawing things.’ _Oh mighty and benevolent Federation, please give my son shoes, also paper and crayons, that his artistic talent may develop in this wretched mess we call a homeworld._ ‘For now, anyway, I thought we might all get a bit more work done in the garden. Do you want to come and help me get the fertiliser and the seeds?’

That meant walking back to the aid station, of course, and Victor once again slung himself between the two of them, holding a hand each. When he learned that he was to have new shoes, he hugged himself and jumped on the spot, turning in a little circle.

‘Aw, what a little cutie,’ said the petty officer manning the replicator station. ‘What colour do you want, honey?’

‘Red! No, yellow - no - um.’

‘Why not red _and_ yellow?’ Julian asked. ‘You could have yellow shoes with red heels and toes.’

‘Oh, _yes!’_

‘I was beginning to think he might be artistic, but clearly he has your colour sense,’ Garak muttered while Victor was having his feet scanned for size.

‘You can’t stop me liking purple or orange, Garak. It’s just not going to happen.’

‘You could like purple _or_ orange and I wouldn’t mind. The troubling part is that you like purple _and_ orange.’

‘If I do have to go civilian to stay here, I’ll get a purple coat and orange trousers and wear them every day.’

‘Then I will tear them off you.’

 _‘Garak!’_ Julian sounded enjoyably scandalised. 

‘Have I said something wrong?’ He blinked innocently.

‘That was really _flagrant,_ even for you.’

‘Oh? Was it? Thank you for warning me; I’ll be more subtle from now on.’

‘Look at my _shoes_ ,’ said a voice from below waist level, so they promptly suspended the conversation to admire the shoes, which looked sturdy and comfortable, if very bright. Victor walked with elaborate care on the way back to the vegetable garden, trying not to get them dusty, although that was a losing battle. Julian let him ride part of the way on the small cart they had been given to transport the sacks of fertiliser, and he sat on top of the sacks clapping his feet together happily. 

Garak had noted how much more obliging the aid personnel were when you had someone in Starfleet uniform with you; it wasn’t that they hadn’t given what he asked for in the past, but with Julian there they had suggested helpful extras (such as the cart, which he alone would have had to request separately). Moreover, they had given them food for lunch in advance, so they wouldn’t have to make another trip to pick it up. Normally food would only be issued at mealtimes, in an effort to discourage a black market from developing, or an effort to humble the Cardassians and remind them of how dependent they currently were on Federation goodwill, depending on your perspective.

‘When will you be expected back at the station?’ he asked Julian as they unloaded their equipment beside the tilled ground. 

‘I asked for three days’ leave initially, and this morning while you were in the shower I got on to Colonel Kira and extended that to a week.’

‘How is the Colonel?’ Garak had always rather liked her, all the more because she had the backbone to openly despise him.

‘She’s all right. A bit glum at times, for which I don’t blame her, but working hard and doing an excellent job.’

‘Why is she glum? Who is she?’ Victor asked, so as they started spreading the fertiliser Julian explained to him about Kira and Odo, which led into a fuller explanation of changelings and the Founders and what the recent war had actually been about.

‘Everything happens because of something that happened before,’ Victor said, his little brows knit in consternation. ‘Like people were mean to the Founders so they’re mean back _first._ When do people stop doing that? Because if they don’t won’t we always have wars?’

‘I’m afraid we probably will always have wars,’ Julian admitted. ‘Some over things that happened in the past, some over new problems that have just come up. When you take them one by one, most people are pretty reasonable. But when you start dealing with large groups of people, whole nations or worlds, the unreasonable-ness seems to get amplified. And of course people get scared and angry when they think another lot of people might take over the place where they live. The trouble is, people can also get very convinced that they have a good reason to take over the place where someone else lives. Everyone thinks they’ve got a valid reason for the way they behave; it’s hardly ever just to be mean.’

‘What’s valid?’

‘Worthwhile. Good enough. Do you think you can use your new word in a sentence of your own?’

Victor thought, then grinned. ‘I think this is going to be a very valid vegetable garden.’

When the sun was high in the sky they stopped for lunch, sitting in the slight shade offered by a broken wall near the garden. Garak leaned back against the warm stones and closed his eyes, listening to the other two chatter on, and a sense of contentment seeped into him. _This is my little family. My two clever, talkative, beautiful boys._

Julian nudged him in the side. ‘Now might be a good time to talk about what we discussed earlier,’ he said quietly.

‘I suppose so.’ He opened his eyes and blinked against the strong sun, preparing to use the hateful name for the last time. ‘Eighty, why don’t you come and sit beside me? Between the two of us?’

‘All right.’ The boy stepped over Julian’s lap and sat down in the space made by Garak shifting over. ‘Is that better?’

‘It’s fine. We, ah, we’d like to talk to you about something very important. So perhaps you’d like to finish your cookie first.’ He regretted saying that because the boy immediately looked anxious and stuffed his cookie down so fast that he almost choked, and had to be patted on the back and given water by Julian.

‘All better? Good, good. Thank you, doctor. Well, er, as you noted earlier this morning, Julian _is_ a doctor. A very accomplished and talented doctor.’ He smiled at him over the boy’s head, and nodded to him to continue, or for heaven’s sake at least back him up.

‘And Garak is a former Cardassian government agent,’ Julian added. ‘Who served his state very bravely. He’s done quite a few other jobs, too. When I met him, years ago, he was actually a tailor. We made friends, and in time, well, we fell in love. We couldn’t really be together then, though. Garak didn’t think it was safe. It was a bit of a complicated time. Things are different now, though. We’ve decided to live together. And we’d like for you to live with us, too.’

‘Because I’m your son?’ Victor asked, his voice a breathless squeak.

‘Yes, you are. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you right away, but we had to sort some things out first.’

‘Because you had to see if I was good enough,’ Victor said, nodding, wide-eyed.

‘Actually, we were concerned about whether _we_ were good enough,’ Julian said.

‘Don’t say that,’ Garak objected. ‘You’ll worry him.’

‘I’m just being honest.’

‘We are all exactly good enough for each other,’ Garak pronounced firmly. 

‘So we’re a valid family?’ Julian asked with a quirk of amusement at the corner of his mouth.

‘Completely valid.’ Garak had the wind knocked out of him as Victor sprang into his lap and hugged him around the neck. He was quite unprepared for how it felt, the skinny little arms so strong and the soft little cheek pressed to his and the warm little body full of life and youth and love. It gave him a quite ridiculous sweet pain around his heart. He put his arms around the boy hesitantly and hugged back. _Little round belly against mine and he smells like a baby Julian._ His nose and eyes stung again, and he had to inhale hard. He had just settled comfortably into the hug when the boy squirmed out of his arms and leaped into Julian’s lap to give him the same. The heart-pain and eye-sting got worse as he watched Julian cuddle their son, until he had no choice but to scoot over and wrap his arms around both of them. Julian kissed his cheek in the crush. It was quite a while before he felt ready to let go.

‘I’m going to be really, really good,’ Victor said earnestly.

‘Of course you will.’ Garak tried to smooth down the child’s hair. ‘You’re a good boy.’

‘What’s my name?’ He gave an eager little bounce.

‘Oh. Well, we’ve discussed that,’ Julian said. ‘If you don’t like the name we thought of, of course, let us know.’

‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t like it,’ Garak said, suddenly foreseeing that he was going to have to be the parent who actually set rules and said no. ‘It’s a perfectly good name.’

‘Is it valid?’ Victor asked, giggling. 

‘Entirely. How would you like to be called Victor?’ Julian asked.

‘Victor Tolan Bashir Garak,’ Garak said, with a touch of firmness. He really didn’t want the whole thing to get bounced back to committee. Evidently that would not be a problem, since they both got firmly neck-hugged again, briefly this time, because Victor was unable to contain his excitement and had to jump off their laps and do a mad little twirling dance of joy on the spot, singing ‘Victor Victor, vee vee Victor’ until he got dizzy and fell across their legs, giggling.

‘I think he likes it,’ Julian said, smiling at Garak and squeezing his hand. 

‘Do you? He’s playing it pretty close to the chest.’

‘Ah, well, he is your son.’


	7. Shelter

Three months today, according to Julian’s calendar; three months as a family. Garak had found it best to take things very much one day at a time, and hadn’t really thought about how long it had been until Julian mentioned it at breakfast.

There had been so many changes in that time that it hadn’t felt like one _unit_ of time, so to speak. No predictability, no routine. So much to _do._ First there had been Dr Moset to dispose of. When he came back from whatever had led him to wander off, leaving a four-year-old alone, they had greeted him pleasantly, announced their happy news, Julian had taken Victor for a walk to the aid station to see if they could get something nice for dinner to celebrate, and Garak had quietly, with a smile, informed Moset that it was time he left, and went as far as he could. 

‘A man of your learning and reputation could doubtless find employment in so many places. Perhaps even as far off as the Romulan Star Empire. If you go far enough, perhaps I won’t even be able to find you.’ He’d seen the confidence flicker and dim in the man’s eyes. ‘No. I will find you. But I’ll be very busy for a good while yet, so you have some time. Why not make the most of it?’

‘I’ve given you a gift,’ Moset sputtered, starting to bluster.

‘And I am giving a gift to you. You would be an awful fool not to take it.’

That had been all it took, to his relief. He’d been able to tell Julian, with perfect, to-the-letter truth, that now he was no longer responsible for Victor, Dr Moset had decided to pursue his own interests. He was certainly interested in preserving his own life. He’d left the next morning, giving Victor a brisk goodbye pat. Julian had been worried about tears, but Victor hadn’t seemed to mind. He had his fathers, after all; for Dr Moset to leave the picture was only what he had been expecting.

They couldn’t settle down yet, for first Julian had to go back to DS9 and tie off loose ends there, saying goodbye, handing over his duties as CMO to a Bajoran doctor. While he was there, Colonel Kira had had to sit him down and tell him that the word from on high was ‘no.’ Or more politely, that they implored him to reconsider; that they would once again offer him his pick of assignments. To his amusement, a selection of the most run-down crapholes in space had been suggested, in case that was his type. But if he intended to make his home on Cardassia Prime, if he intended to go and live with Elim Garak, he would have to resign from Starfleet - and his activities would be closely monitored from then on.

‘I really take that as an enormous compliment,’ Garak had said when he’d heard. Julian had been rather glum about it. Having declared himself willing to sacrifice his career for love and family, he had clearly been hoping that fate would intervene to prevent him actually having to do any such thing. Kira had been sympathetic, of course, but there was nothing she could do to help; she had pretty much negative pull where the admiralty was concerned. And so he’d packed up his life there, bought everyone who remained a round of drinks in Quark’s, and come back to Cardassia bearing gifts.

There had been the bed, of course, which Garak couldn’t find it in himself to complain about, particularly when he lay down on it at the end of the day. It took up a disproportionate amount of space in the tent, but it earned its keep. Then the toys: Julian had brought Victor a plush bear of his own, boy and girl dolls, building bricks, model animals, a drum, an assortment of little starships, a great block of drawing paper and a wooden case filled with pencils and crayons in every imaginable colour. In his eagerness, he’d rather overdone it. Victor had been so bewildered by the profusion that they’d had to put almost all of them away under the bed and bring them back out separately and gradually over several weeks. 

Garak had been teaching him to make simple clothes for the dolls, and making new clothes for him at the same time. That had been another gift; Julian had brought several bolts of fabric, in surprisingly good taste, saying he’d thought Garak would rather make something to suit himself than be given ready-made new clothes. There was another clothing and tailor’s shop on the Promenade now, not in the same retail unit but two along from it. ‘Very inferior to yours,’ Julian assured him, ‘but they had some nice raw materials.’ Final gift: a solar-recharging sewing machine, all complete.

So he cut, pinned and sewed little smocks and overalls for Victor, occasionally pausing to help the boy thread his oversized beginner’s needle or tie a knot as he pieced together a doll’s pinafore. Together they worked in the garden, where green seedlings were starting to break through the soil. With Julian he went to and fro among the tents, organising the distribution of resources, enlisting people to work on various little improvement projects, hearing problems, treating the sick and injured. Mercifully, the purple coat and orange trousers had never materialised, but Julian had had him run up a pale blue coat that made him look vaguely official and medical without infringing on Starfleet Medical territory.

Before any of that could begin to feel like routine, more changes. The ablution block was extended, that was a blessing - now they could actually take showers, although they still washed Victor in a tub because he was so little. The Bajoran tents, which were all second or third hand, brought in as a temporary measure, were cleared away and new-made prefabricated shelters replaced them. This meant extending the boundaries of the tent city, since the new shelters were bigger than the tents, and quite a contretemps with the aid people about whether the garden they’d worked so hard on should stay or be covered over. Reason and horticulture had prevailed, but it had been close.

Their shelter was a standard-sized one for a small family. It had one decent-sized room which held their beds, a mat on the floor and assorted shelves for their other belongings, and a small lean-to section which they used as a kitchen and laundry. The walls were a colour Garak referred to as Standard Federation Beige. They did keep out the dust, though. They were papered on the inside with Victor’s drawings, many of which were sequences intended to tell a story.

That was now that he was drawing properly again. For a little while, he’d regressed strangely, becoming almost babyish in his behaviour, clinging to them and wanting to be carried around. His speech became babble and his drawings scribble. It had really bothered Garak, but Julian thought he had made sense of it.

‘He’s making up for lost time,’ he’d said one night, as they lay in bed with Victor curled up asleep between them. ‘He didn’t get to be a baby properly the first time. He’s just trying to get as much as he can of the sort of warm cuddly love he never had before.’ He stroked Victor’s round cheek with one finger. ‘My little baby bear.’

‘Do you think he’ll catch up again?’

‘I’m sure he will. He was trying so hard before, and now he can stop _trying_ he’s just fallen back a bit. Don’t worry.’

Julian had ended up scolding him for trying to get Victor out of that phase by avoiding excessive contact. 

‘Go and hug your son!’

‘He’s had about nine hugs already today and he spent the morning riding around on your back!’

‘He thinks you’re cross with him.’

‘We’re going to spoil that child.’

‘You spoil children by letting them do and have whatever they want and be inconsiderate little brutes, not by showing them natural physical affection.’

The problem was that if he hadn’t stopped himself, he would have wanted to carry Victor around with him all the time. It was extremely disconcerting to feel this way. He’d told himself that he would need time to grow to love the child, that his affection might be a little remote and austere but nevertheless genuine, but here he was perpetually wanting to kiss his precious little face and tickle him and blow raspberries on his belly. Perhaps that was _why_ the boy had regressed; Garak had treated him too much like a baby so he had responded in kind. Eventually he’d admitted as much to Julian, who had only laughed and said he’d better get all his raspberries in now, then, before Victor got big enough to find it embarrassing.

‘You don’t think it’s my fault?’

‘I’m just glad to hear you actually like hugging him and weren’t just doing it to please me.’

One thing, anyway; he wasn’t sucking his thumb, had simply stopped doing it on his own, even without those mean little thumb-guards. Instead he sucked the ear of his teddy-bear, so that the ear was rapidly becoming a matted rag, but at least he wasn’t ruining his teeth or his thumbnail.

And he’d come through the baby-phase, and was talking properly again and squirming indignantly to be let down if Garak forgot and picked him up to carry him somewhere. The exception was piggyback and shoulder rides; he loved those because he could see the world from adult height. Julian got to give most of those, unfairly, because his narrower back was easier for a small boy to get his legs around, and he could bear the weight for longer, particularly on his shoulders. Garak had to settle for walking hand in hand, or sometimes Victor would glom onto the lower part of his leg, like one of the model animals called a koala, and he’d make a show of struggling to walk, nevertheless swinging him through the air while he shrieked with laughter.

Julian could do the more energetic stuff like space-shuttle rides, that was all right by him. Still, one of the best parts of his day was in the evening, when Victor was freshly bathed and warm and sweet-smelling, wrapped up in his dressing-gown, sitting in his lap, leaning drowsily against his chest, as he read him his nightly story. He would read to him quietly, gentle Cardassian nursery stories in which happy, good children had mild, funny adventures and faced simple problems that they solved either together or by appealing to a wise and helpful adult for guidance (which Julian said reminded him of nothing so much as Milly-Molly-Mandy, whoever that was). The stories had nothing to do with the world outside their shelter, of course; it was debatable whether they’d ever had any real bearing on the lives of Cardassian children, but they were an ideal, and children should have those.

They would tuck Victor into bed, with his bear and whichever doll or animal was the favourite of the day, kiss him good night and retreat to a seat Julian had bashed together just in front of their shelter, so that he could have dark and quiet to settle to sleep in, while they shared a last cup of tea and a talk about the day just passed and the one to come. They never sat up late; they were both too tired and anyway there was nothing to do. Sometimes Julian would doze off leaning on Garak’s shoulder and need to be nudged awake. They would take turns to go to the ablution block so that someone remained near Victor; nothing could be done without thinking of him first, and that was the greatest adjustment to his life Garak had ever experienced, even more so than his exile. It was like having another part of your body that didn’t necessarily go everywhere with you but needed to be protected just as much as the rest.

In the early days they had felt completely inhibited from any intimacy in their bed, with Victor asleep nearby. ‘I’ve had loud sex for the last time in my life, I suppose,’ Julian mumbled. ‘I wish I’d known so I could have been noisier.’ Gradually, a combination of confidence in his sound sleeping, low cunning and sheer desperation had led them to attempt at least a few substitutes for what Julian termed ‘proper’ sex. It wasn’t enough, but it took the edge off.

‘We’ve got to get him some friends or something,’ Julian whispered as they lay getting their breath back after one such muffled bout. ‘Just to get him out of the house for a bit. God, I need you, and you’re here all the time, and I can’t _have_ you!’

‘Please don’t say things like that. I was just starting to calm down.’ Garak kissed his forehead and gave him an admonitory pinch on the thigh.

‘Would you agree, though?’

‘I’d agree. Go to sleep, dearest.’

By morning Victor was always in their bed, curled up in the warmth between them. It was a strange life, but Garak thought he could be happy with it, if it would just stay this way for a while.

  



	8. Guests

Garak spent his afternoon making adjustments to the drip irrigation system in the vegetable garden. He was generally pleased with it, but every now and then he thought its efficiency might be somehow improved. It was a bright clear day, the sunlight a harsh glare. A few feet away, Victor was moving around in a crouch, diligently grubbing out weeds from under the fresh green leaves of the growing vegetables. Over beyond the garden, three little boys near his size and age, perhaps a little older, were similarly crouched, playing knucklebones. Victor occasionally glanced over at them, wistfully, before resuming his task.

It was the same again and again, and it made Garak grind his teeth. With other small children, Victor would make friends easily. He was bright and friendly and had good ideas for imaginary games. They would play together happily, once. Then the other children would go home and tell their parents about their new friend, and somehow, they wouldn’t play with Victor again. One bold little boy had proved an exception, had come back and played with Victor a second time, his defiant manner making it quite clear he had been told not to. The third time, his father had come and fetched him home, grim-faced, one hand hard on his shoulder. The other boy had looked back, once, his expression rueful; _you see how it is,_ he seemed to say. Victor had waved goodbye, his mouth set in the tight-lipped uncomfortable-but-polite smile he’d inherited from Julian. That had been that.

Part of the problem was that the children weren’t in school. It hadn’t been organised yet, and it needed to be. Why was nobody taking care of that? Did they expect Garak to do everything? He thought he had more than enough on his plate. His garden had caterpillars and his in-laws were coming to visit.

He was amused at himself for having such petty concerns, but the caterpillars were no joke. They had done enough damage to some of the brassicas that the crop was threatened. The Bashirs were really only a problem because their impending arrival was making Julian irritable and anxious. He was threatening to do something foolish, like go around to the prefabs of other children’s parents to demand to know why his son wasn’t good enough for them.

‘It makes me furious too,’ Garak had told him over their evening cup of tea, ‘but you’ll only make matters worse for him. We must wait them out.’

‘And they’ll just get used to him? Accept him in the end? Or perhaps they’ll simply remain comfortable in their prejudices and he’ll remain a pariah all his life,’ Julian said bitterly. ‘He needs friends. Company his own age. He’s getting lonely and bored.’

In the absence of friends, Victor had plenty of toys, both the ones Julian had brought him and the ones his grandparents had sent after Julian’s first letter, along with an effusive video message promising to visit as soon as they could arrange it. Now he had a small multitude of dolls, and had organised them into families, with names and histories and jobs for the parents. He had a notebook full of their family trees and could answer almost any question about their backgrounds, or about the relationships between individuals. Julian found this terribly interesting and would happily discuss them with him for ages. Together they had made a little video to send back to the Bashirs, in which Victor earnestly introduced his favourite families and explained their circumstances.

‘This is Mr and Mrs Boof,’ he narrated, as Julian pointed the camera at a doll couple seated at table on the living-room mat. ‘They are, um, animal doctors, and they look after all the animals, like the koalas.’ He put a clip-on koala on the table. ‘This koala is sick because he ate a poisonous leaf so they make him some medicine and it makes him throw up a lot but that’s all right because he throws up the leaf and feels much better. Then Mr Boof cleans up the sick and Mrs Boof shows the koala which leaves are safe to eat. And they have a daughter called Tweela and twin sons called Pat and Pot.’

Later in the video, which Garak had somewhat dubiously watched before Julian sent it off, he gave a little tour of the prefab and its contents. It all looked very small and shabby on the padd screen, not as cosy as Garak had grown to see it. ‘And this is the kitchen, this is where Papa makes tea, that’s his cup and that’s Daddy’s cup and that’s _my_ cup, with V for Victor, and this is the laundry and those are Daddy’s underpants I think - yes they are! They are, see, look. Okay. Back through here is the big room and this is my bed. That’s Daddy and Papa’s bed. This is Snickuppy.’ He held up the bear, which had a scarf tied around its neck. ‘He’s pretending it’s winter and it’s snowy. He’s a silly bear. It’s really hot. Ummmm. Oh! Papa’s back! Papa, come and say hello to Granny and Granddad on Earth.’

Garak could only wonder what Amsha and Richard Bashir had made of the video - except it went without saying that they must be enchanted by their grandson. Their son-in-law, so to speak, might be another matter. He had not looked his most prepossessing, coming home in his gardening clothes. He would have to try to be more presentable when they arrived.

Looking up from the irrigation system, he saw that Victor had finished his weeding and was gazing mournfully at the knucklebone boys. It hurt him to see the longing on Victor’s face and know that he could do nothing to alleviate it. Even if Julian thought him cold-blooded on this point, he was not immune to the urge to yell at some unenlightened parents until they agreed that Victor was an ideal playmate for any child of theirs.

He pushed himself up from his knees and straightened up, pressing his hands into the small of his back. ‘Victor, dear, it’s time we went home and cleaned up.’

‘All right.’ Victor got to his feet, brushing his hands on his overalls.

‘Granny and Granddad are coming tomorrow,’ Garak reminded him.

‘I know.’

‘Well, won’t that be fun?’

‘I spose,’ Victor said, and fetched the most lugubrious sigh Garak had ever heard out of a four-year-old. ‘Why don’t they like me?’

‘They do like you. Their parents, on the other hand, disapprove of you, and they must obey their parents. Come on.’ Garak took Victor’s grubby little hand and they began to walk back.

‘Why, though? Do they know about the burned garden?’

‘No. That isn’t it. You must understand, first and foremost, that the situation isn’t your fault. It’s not because of anything that you could have done differently. There are other children in a similar situation, though they’re half Bajoran rather than half Human. If they were here, they wouldn’t be welcome to play with Cardassian children either.’

‘I wish they _were_ here. Anyway, me being half Human is a _good_ thing. It’s why I’m clever. And why don’t they mind Daddy?’

‘Actually, some of them do mind Daddy, quite a lot, but they don’t say anything about it because he’s a very useful person to have around. There aren’t enough doctors, particularly ones who know Cardassians well, so they’ll put up with him.’

‘But Daddy’s so _nice,’_ Victor said plaintively. ‘Don’t they see how nice he is?’

‘Perhaps, once they get used to him, they’ll see. We must be patient. These things can take a surprisingly long time.’

‘I can understand all sorts of clever maths but I can’t understand _that.’_

‘You’re very much like him that way.’

‘Good at maths?’

‘Oh, yes, very.’ There was a grain of truth in that; Julian was tutoring Victor in mathematics that Garak supposed he might be able to understand if he focused on nothing else for a solid year, but that to the two of them appeared to be second nature. Fun, even. He felt rather excluded when they had their heads together over their numbers, though it did give him a certain quiet pleasure to look over at the two of them, so bright and animated as they discussed angles and integers and so on and so forth. Sometimes Julian would catch him watching, and look up and twinkle his eyes at him, and he would sigh and prepare to be fondly teased at some later time about his growing sentimentality. 

Not that Julian knew the half of it. In the months before Moset and Victor, then Julian arrived, Garak had slept with a certain item under his pillow, an item whose significance would not be clear to anyone else. Indeed, to most people it would have looked like litter. It was a small silver-trimmed cardboard box that had once held chocolates, now thoroughly flattened and worn. It had earlier lived under his pillow in his quarters on DS9, and he had considered throwing it away before leaving for Cardassia, but found that he simply couldn’t. The idea of sentimental value had always seemed rather ridiculous to him, but there it was. Because Julian had given the box to him, and what was more, given it with a look of such fondness that he had been quite unable to mask the love in his own eyes, he had to keep it. 

He had spun those chocolates out for as long as possible, then spent a while occasionally opening the box to smell the ghost of them. When the sweet smell was entirely gone he had demoted the box to holding pins in his shop, then one day accidentally put a heavy bolt of fabric on top of it and crushed it flat. He had felt quite guilty about that, and perhaps moving the flattened box to the under-pillow position was a sort of compensation for being so careless. He knew how pathetic he was being and did it anyway. When he knew Julian was coming to live with him, he had been thrown into a brief tizzy lest he discover the squashed box and realise what a _sap_ he was. He still couldn’t throw it away, even if he was going to have Julian _on_ the pillow from then on. Fortunately, his habitual good sense had prevailed, and he had hit on the happy compromise of hiding the box in plain sight, folding it into a wedge to prop up the wobbly leg of the bedside table. One day, perhaps, it would be swept up and discarded, but not by him; that was the main thing.

Garak and Victor visited the ablution block before returning home, to properly wash their hands and arms, and Victor’s face, since he had managed to transfer smudges of earth onto it.

‘How do you do it?’ Garak asked, scrubbing at Victor’s nose with a wet handkerchief. ‘If you’re within arm’s reach of a dirt source, somehow, you _will_ get it onto your face.’

‘Remember when we had pamcakes and I got syrup on my forehead?’ Victor asked, sounding rather proud of himself. The ‘pamcakes’ had cemented his hero-worship of Julian, because the ability to flip and catch a pancake was evidently one of the most impressive things Victor had ever seen. It was interesting to observe how differently he related to his two fathers; Garak had rather expected that he would treat them both the same, but he was always more _impressed_ by Julian. He had grumbled a little about that, and Julian had pointed out that when Victor was scared or hurt, he would bolt to Garak first if he had a choice. A neighbour had recently acquired a riding hound, a rangy, scabby beast that he was convinced he could turn into a prize-winner. It frequently slipped its chain and went snuffling around the dusty streets. Victor was terrified of it and would hide behind Garak’s legs whenever it passed by.

‘But,’ Julian had said, ‘if you’re not there, only me, he’ll actually go into the house to hide from it. If you _are_ there, he feels safe enough hanging onto your trouser leg.’

They went home, leaving their dirty shoes on a rack by the front door, and spent a pleasant half hour or so on an impromptu dolls’ tea party. Julian was quite perplexed by this habit of theirs, and said so when he came home, bringing dinner with him, and found them thus engaged.

‘Don’t Human children play games like that?’ Garak asked him later, when they were having their pre-bedtime tea outside.

‘Well, yes, just... mostly the girls.’

‘Well, you already knew our gender roles were somewhat different from yours. You’ve noticed how some patients have difficulty believing a male doctor can be fully competent.’ Julian had been quite indignant about some of the comments he’d had, and Garak had had to explain that men doctors like Moset were the exception rather than the rule. Careers in the sciences were female-dominated and had been for centuries.

‘I suppose... is all that baby-doll stuff I see him doing pretty typical Cardassian boy behaviour too? Putting them to bed and dressing them and pretending to feed them?’

‘Of course. What did _you_ do with your dolls when you were a child?’

‘Ah, I didn’t have dolls. I had _action figures.’_ Julian gave him a little smile over the rim of his cup, the whites of his eyes glinting in the evening gloom.

‘Surely the point of dolls is to teach children to be gentle and caring and to rehearse parental roles. Little boys learn to be good fathers that way, just as girls learn to be motherly.’

‘So it’s normal, then? Not that it matters if it’s not, as long as he’s happy, but I did wonder.’

‘Really, what _did_ you do with your dolls? You’ve piqued my curiosity now.’

‘I sent them on adventures. Sometimes with parachutes, out the attic window.’

‘I would have thought you were quite disturbed.’

Julian laughed softly and leaned his head on Garak’s shoulder. ‘I was thinking, speaking of teaching him to be gentle and caring... perhaps he should have a pet. What sort of animals do Cardassian children keep as pets?’

‘Wompats, mostly... sometimes voles, though they’re not as cuddly. Onyx beetles, in a terrarium - I had a few of those, though I was never really all that interested in them. Did you have any pets?’

‘I had a tortoise. Well, our house had a tortoise; it came with the place. It was about a hundred years old, and it hibernated all winter in a box lined with straw in the garden shed. Then in spring it would wake up, and in summertime it would go absolutely wild if you fed it strawberries. It was incredibly boring except for that. What’s a wompat like?’

‘Long and thin and furry. A little mammal with a pointy nose and beady eyes.’

‘Oh. I ask because there’s a rather delightful little Earth animal called a wom _bat,_ which looks like... it looks like a little quadrupedal Chief O’Brien.’

‘Now _there’s_ a picture.’

‘Garak?’

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘I’d just like to apologise in advance for anything embarrassing or insulting my parents may say or do tomorrow.’

‘I’m sure that’s quite unnecessary.’

 

Julian woke first in the morning, feeling unsettled from a recurring bad dream, the one in which he was back at school and the headmaster called a special assembly to denounce him as a freak and a fraud. The feeling of dread and shame melted away quickly enough, though. It was hard to feel anything but cosy and contented in bed in the morning. For once, Victor was not snuggled in between him and Garak; if he lifted his head slightly, he could see him starfished on his own bed, covers half kicked off and arms flung over his head. He always found it touching, somehow, to see how Victor slept, sprawled out and completely unguarded. 

By contrast, Garak slept curled up like a prawn. Except when he was sick, Julian had never seen him sleep stretched out on his back, as he often did, or even on his front; it was tight foetal position on his side or nothing. At least it made him easy to spoon. Julian nestled up to his back and rubbed his cheek against the nape of his neck, deliberately scratching him with his stubble. Garak made a sort of drowsy rumbling sound, so he rubbed with his chin.

‘What are you doing?’ Garak mumbled peevishly.

‘Waking you up.’ He kept his voice low, close to a whisper.

‘Hrrmm.’ Garak abruptly rolled over and pinned him down, one knee between his, hands gripping his arms. ‘There.’

‘There?’

‘There. Now I’ll go back to sleep.’ He gently lowered his weight onto Julian’s body and closed his eyes.

‘No you won’t.’ He always enjoyed Garak blanketing him like this, even if he was too heavy for it to be comfortable for long. He wriggled one arm out of his grasp and wrapped it around Garak’s back, sighing contentedly.

‘I know. Sometimes I wish he were deaf.’

‘He’s sound asleep...’ Julian said tentatively.

‘He wouldn’t sleep through what I want to do.’

‘When you put it that way, right next to my ear, in your secret sexy sleepy voice... it’s really very unfair.’

‘I’ve thought of an upside to your parents’ visit. Perhaps they’ll want to baby-sit.’

‘Nooooo... you reminded me,’ Julian groaned.

‘There, there.’ Garak turned his head slightly and nuzzled at his cheek. ‘It will all be all right.’

‘You haven’t met them. You don’t know.’

‘I wish I had met them. Do you know, I really found it very odd that Dr Zimmerman interviewed everybody _but_ me about their impressions of you?’

‘You wouldn’t have told him anything anyway.’

‘I might have.’

‘You would just have smirked and twinkled your eyes at him.’

‘I could have said... hmm.. Dr Bashir is a _very_ interesting young man. Very bright and curious and open to new experiences. Yes, I would say that his open-mindedness is one of his most appealing traits. He’s _very_ flexible.’

‘And have I mentioned I’ve had him up against a bulkhead?’

‘I would _never_ say such a thing.’

‘While he gasped and moaned and-’ Garak put his hand over his mouth, and he gave a smothered laugh and licked the palm.

‘Ugh, you little...’ Garak wiped his hand on Julian’s cheek and kissed him severely. ‘Behave yourself. I actually would have liked to meet your parents back then, you know. Why didn’t you introduce me?’

‘I was embarrassed. Not by you, by them. And everything that went with them. I wanted to keep those bits of my life separate.’

‘Realising that you could be so deceptive and secretive... that there was such a skeleton in your closet and I’d never had the slightest suspicion...’

‘I’m sorry, my darling...’

‘Only cemented my adoration for you. Such depth!’

‘You wanted to probe my depths, didn’t you.’

‘I am _trying_ to redirect this conversation to be more tender and less rampantly sexual.’

‘If we went into the kitchen and shut the door...’

‘We _can’t_ do that where we _prepare food.’_

‘Yes we can. Come on. I know for a physiological fact that you want to as much as I do.’

He won the point, he supposed because Garak knew he needed something special this morning. The glow of it didn’t last very long in the face of his anxiety. Julian had arranged a day off for this occasion; his patients could still call on him if there were an emergency, but for less pressing matters they could contact the Starfleet Medical aid base (not that all of them would wish to; there was a curious double or possibly triple standard regarding Cardassian pride and who they were willing to take help from, and he still wasn’t entirely sure how he fitted into it). He had an awkward but workable relationship with the aid base; he wasn’t exactly a traitor or a deserter, though most people found it hard to understand the choice he’d made, even for love. At any rate, the shared goal of alleviating suffering, treating illness and injury, and preventing further harm tended to smooth over any really rough spots.

He had his usual morning wash and shave at the kitchen sink, got dressed and woke up Victor while Garak made breakfast. He felt a little squish of tenderness for the way his little son rubbed his sleepy eyes with the heels of his hands, then lowered them and smiled up at him.

‘Good morning, sausage. Do you remember what’s happening today?’

‘Granny and Granddad.’ Victor sat up and hugged him round the neck.

‘That’s right. Will you help me tidy up the place and make everything nice for them?’ 

‘Are they going to sleep here? Will we make them beds?’ 

Julian couldn’t help laughing slightly at the thought. ‘No, darling, we haven’t got room. I’ve organised a place for them up on the _Endeavour.’_

‘Can we go up and visit there?’

‘Probably,’ Julian said carefully. It seemed a bit unkind to Victor to expose him to the comforts of a starship and then bring him back down to his scruffy, cramped home, and to the fact that his fathers could, right now, offer him nothing better. ‘We’ll see.’ He got Victor dressed and they had breakfast, seated on cushions on the floor around a small table that folded up and stood against the wall when not in use. 

‘I think I’m actually getting used to hot fish juice as a breakfast drink,’ he admitted. 

‘I knew you’d see sense in time,’ Garak said with a small smile.

‘I suppose it’s like Marmite.’ A jar thereof was a luxury he had obtained from a replicator, and enjoyed very thinly spread on his toast in the mornings.

‘It is nothing like that vile stuff.’

‘I like fish juice _and_ Marmite,’ Victor reported happily, with traces of both smeared around his mouth.

‘I mean it’s an acquired taste. And people generally love it or hate it. It’s very polarising stuff. Miles O’Brien detests it, which is surprising, because he generally enjoys very strong flavours, coffee you can stand up a spoon in, and so on. Speaking of whom, I had a letter from him yesterday; forgot to tell you. He and Keiko are thinking of coming out here.’

‘Whatever for? I thought he had a teaching post at Starfleet Academy, and she was thrilled to be going home to the safety and greenery of Earth.’

‘It was actually her idea. She wants to be involved in the environmental recovery work - and you can see that he’d be invaluable in the reconstruction efforts. If anyone knows how to repair ruined Cardassian stuff, it’s O’Brien. Anyway, nothing is decided yet, but they’re investigating the possibility.’

‘Well, it would be wonderful for you to have your friend living close by again,’ Garak said pleasantly, with no sign of the territoriality (jealousy?) Julian sometimes suspected he felt where O’Brien was concerned. ‘I know how you’ve missed him.’

‘Do they have any children?’ Victor asked hopefully.

‘Two, Molly and Yoshi. You’re in between them in age. Would you like to write them a letter? It’s not definite that they’ll be coming, but I’m sure they’d like to have a pen-pal.’

‘Would they be allowed to write back?’ Victor asked, and the hope was tempered with worry. 

‘Absolutely. Well, Molly would write back, Yoshi might just draw you a picture. He’s just starting to learn his letters. What is he now... two, three?’

‘I knew _my_ letters when I was three,’ Victor pointed out.

‘Yes, but different children learn at different rates, when they’re ready to. Victor, this is really important: don’t ever look down on someone else because they’re not as quick to learn as you are, all right?’

‘Can I look down on them if they’re shorter than me?’

‘It’s nicer if you bob down and look them in the eye, my darling.’

‘It was a jo-oke,’ Victor moaned.

‘I thought it was funny,’ Garak said, smiling. ‘Now, shall we clean the half of your breakfast that you didn’t eat off your face and get you ready to go and meet Granny and Granddad?’

‘Yup!’

Amsha and Richard Bashir were arriving on a small chartered ship; it worried Julian a little to think of what it must have cost them, but they’d assured him that money was no object whatever when it meant seeing their son and meeting their grandson. And, of course, their... son-in-law was not quite the word, but he was aware that he was sort of submitting Garak for their approval. He shouldn’t be nervous about that, since their relationship was a _fait accompli,_ and anyway, if they didn’t approve of Garak that was their mistake. Still, it added to the bubbles in his stomach. 

They beamed into the aid station, since that was the transporter hub for the city. Standing beside Garak, Victor between them holding their hands, Julian took a deep breath and set his face into a pleasant smile. They appeared in a shimmy of lights, and almost before the shimmer had cleared, Amsha was rushing forward with a glad cry. 

‘Jules! Darling!’ She engulfed him in a hug that he returned one-armed. Before he could catch his breath, she was pulling back and bending down. ‘And is this our little Victor?’

‘Yes,’ said Victor shyly.

‘Sweetie, Granny is so, so happy to meet you.’ She put out her hands and gently cupped his cheeks. ‘What a lovely little boy you are!’

‘Hullo Jules - Julian,’ said Richard, stepping forward to shake Julian’s free hand. ‘All right?’

‘Yes, thanks Dad.’ He felt his smile tighten a bit, and glanced across to Garak for moral support. ‘I’d like you to meet my, um, this is Elim Garak.’

‘Mr Bashir,’ Garak said, with a courteous little inclination of his head. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’

‘Call me Richard. Pleased to meet you.’

‘And please, call me Garak.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Amsha, straightening up. ‘We are _so_ glad to meet Julian’s - special friend.’ Before Garak was quite ready for it, she hugged him too. ‘Welcome to our family, dear.’

‘Thank you,’ Garak said, surprised to feel rather moved, even if he thought ‘special friend’ a silly euphemism. He felt a bump against his leg and looked down to see Victor was leaning against him. He let go the boy’s hand to ruffle his hair, and let his hand rest on top of his head to steady him. 

‘Now shall we go home,’ Amsha asked, bobbing down to Victor again, ‘and you can show us your lovely dollies?’

Victor’s shyness did not last long once he had his dolls to talk about. At home, he paraded them for Amsha’s admiration while Richard filmed them with a holo-cam and Julian and Garak sat at the table feeling awkward in their own home.

‘I hope they haven’t brought him too many presents,’ Julian whispered, casting a sidelong glance at the two large bags his parents had brought, ‘because where will we _keep_ them?’

‘I’m more concerned about him being spoiled,’ Garak murmured back. 

‘But that’s what grandparents are for.’

‘If they’re going to spoil him, you’ll have to stop.’

‘I? You cut the crusts off his toast this morning.’ Julian smirked a little. 

‘So, Jules! You like it here?’ Richard asked, setting down his camera and turning towards them.

‘Well, yes. Of course I do.’

‘The place is in an awful mess, but then, that means there’s lots of room to build. Just think of the Great Fire of London - disastrous, of course, but it gave us Christopher Wren’s churches.’

‘Except,’ Garak said quietly, ‘only six people are recorded to have died in the Fire of London, whereas in the final bombardment of Cardassia Prime, millions died.’

‘Oh,’ said Richard, ‘no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply - sorry, Garak, that was tactless of me. I was trying to look for the bright side, not downplay how bad things have been for you here.’

‘I didn’t know you knew anything about the Fire of London,’ Julian said, hoping to divert the subject a little.

‘Oh, it was in some book you lent me,’ Garak said, waving his hand. ‘It’s quite all right, Richard. I simply mean that the circumstances for reconstruction are very different. Still, a great challenge for capable minds.’

‘And that’s the thing,’ Richard said, leaning forward eagerly, ‘I know it sounds heartless to be excited about a challenge that’s been created by such a disaster, but it _is_ an exciting challenge. This city, for example - you can restore all the things that were beautiful and useful, and change all the things that were ugly or inconvenient.’

‘Good luck getting Garak to admit anything about the city was ugly or inconvenient,’ Julian said. 

‘Not true,’ Garak said. ‘I am the first to admit there were not enough public conveniences, and one often had to walk a long way before finding a litter bin. The reasoning, perversely, was that they made the place look untidy.’

‘There you are, then! Litter bins and public loos for all. Has Jules told you I’m a landscape architect? I’ve been studying urban planning as well - seemed complimentary. Didn’t have much to do _except_ study in New Zealand.’

‘He got his Bachelor’s,’ Amsha put in proudly, having apparently been following two different conversations simultaneously.

‘What’s a bachelor’s?’ Victor asked.

‘Well, sweetie, it means different things depending on what we’re talking about. Most of the time, it means a man who isn’t married. But if we’re talking about education and studying, it means a kind of degree, a special document to say you’ve learned a lot about your chosen subject.’

‘So Papa and Daddy are bachelors?’

‘Confirmed,’ Garak said into his teacup.

‘Sort of,’ Amsha said. ‘That’s a point, Jules darling - are you planning to get married?’

‘Not _planning,_ no.’

‘You should get married!’ Victor exclaimed, and clambered into Garak’s lap. ‘Then there’d be a big wedding and you’d live happily ever after!’

‘You don’t have to get married to live happily ever after,’ Garak told him. ‘Have you been reading Earth fairy-tales?’ Victor made a silly face at him and stuck his head under his arm.

‘It would be nice,’ Amsha said wistfully.

‘Thank you,’ Garak said, ‘but while I do wish to spend the rest of my life with Julian, I have no interest in the formality of marriage.’

‘And that’s fine with me,’ added Julian. ‘Besides, Victor, if we did get married it wouldn’t be a big wedding. It would just be a trip to the registry office and back. Really very boring.’

‘Awwwwwww,’ said Victor, muffled by Garak’s arm.

‘What are you even doing under there?’ Julian asked him.

‘It’s warm. And I can  put my ear on his side and hear his tummy go swoosh.’

‘I’m so glad my insides entertain you, dear. Come out and act civilised for your grandparents.’

‘Want to listen to my tummy?’ Richard asked.

‘Yes please.’

‘Come on, then.’ Victor crawled from Garak’s lap across Julian’s and into his grandfather’s, where he applied his ear firmly to his belly. 

‘It goes pripple-ipple-ipple!’ he exclaimed.

‘That’s breakfast on its way down,’ said Richard. ‘Now wait for it.’ He farted, briefly but forcefully, and Victor dissolved into helpless giggles. ‘That’s breakfast on its way _out.’_

‘Dad...’ Julian said wretchedly.

‘Oh, come on, what sort of little kid doesn’t enjoy a good fart joke?’ Richard ruffled up Victor’s hair, and stopped with a look of concern. ‘Here, he’s got a lump on his head - do you know about this, Jules?’

‘It’s not a lump, Dad, it’s just a partial Cardassian cranial ridge. They go on under the hair. It’s quite normal.’

‘Oh. Just as well. Had me worried there, young Victor! Don’t want you full of lumps and bumps.’ Richard smoothed down his hair and patted the back of his neck. 

‘Do another fart,’ Victor begged.

‘Right you are,’ Richard said, and obliged, to his grandson’s vast amusement.

‘Dad!’ Julian protested. 

Richard grinned and squeezed out another little toot. ‘That’s all for now.’

The day went on more pleasantly than Julian had had any reason to expect. The bags proved to contain not only presents for Victor (clothes, books, games) but a lavish care package for himself, right down to some items from his childhood bedroom - a map of Narnia, bookends shaped like the front and back of an elephant, and the first model ship he’d successfully built. Garak’s present was a vast family album stuffed with pictures and video of Julian growing up.

‘And there’s still lots of room left for your own family pictures,’ Amsha said. ‘And here’s a fresh album for when you fill this one up!’

‘How very thoughtful,’ Garak said, a little taken aback. He paged through the first album, wondering at the contrast between his own childhood and Julian’s. It would be hard to find evidence of a child more thoroughly _wanted_ and treasured than Julian Bashir. He wasn’t sure any pictures of himself as a child existed, other than the standard school-group ones - and perhaps Tain had even found it convenient to have him deleted from those. He wasn’t sure if he had been cute as a child, which Julian had been, almost unbearably so, and increasingly attractive as he matured. It was probably quite a good thing for Julian’s innocence that Garak hadn’t met him when he was seventeen or so. If he told Julian _that_ he would probably want to turn it into some sort of game of ‘wicked teacher seduces eager pupil.’ It might be quite a good idea, then.

Not that he should be thinking about that at the moment, but it was a distraction from Richard teaching Victor to burp at will.


End file.
